WASHINGTON AND CAMP DAVID
Kennedy brought John along to his pre-press-conference breakfast briefing on Wednesday morning. The boy went around the table shaking hands before climbing onto a chair being left vacant for George Ball and refused to leave. When his father opened with his customary “What have we got today?” question, he piped up, “I’ve got a glass of ice water.”
The previous year, the Look photographer Stanley Tretick had proposed a photographic essay titled “The President and His Son.” Kennedy responded through intermediaries that he liked the idea, but he kept postponing it. Laura Bergquist, who would write the text, thought he was reluctant because John had not yet begun talking, and Jackie considered her and Tretick “journalistic thieves,” intent on sneaking photographs of her children. When Tretick heard about the Onassis cruise he called Lincoln to ask if he could shoot the story while Jackie was away. After Lincoln suggested calling back later, he asked if she meant after October 1. “Well, I didn’t say that,” she replied. “But it might be a good idea.”
Salinger called Tretick on Tuesday to say he could begin photographing John and the president the next day. When he walked into the Oval Office on Wednesday morning, Kennedy told him, “We’d better get this out of the way pretty quick. Things get kind of sticky when Jackie’s around.” Bergquist was in New York meeting a deadline, but Kennedy insisted she had to witness the shoot to get “the mood of the boy,” forcing Tretick to spend the day sitting outside the Oval Office, waiting for her to arrive.
Kennedy was in high spirits when he met with Heller to prepare for his press conference. He had already thought up some amusing ripostes and promised “the six o’clock comedy hour.” He had called the conference to announce his decision to approve the sale of surplus U.S. wheat to the Soviet Union. Republicans had denounced the deal, with Nixon calling it “a major foreign policy mistake . . . even more serious than fouling up the Bay of Pigs.” The deal made economic sense, but some of his advisers considered it a grievous political error that would antagonize Poles and other blue-collar ethnics. Johnson told O’Donnell that it was “the worst political mistake” the president had ever made.
Kennedy opened the press conference by rebutting the most common objections to the wheat deal, pointing out that the grain would be transported in American ships, the nation had a huge wheat surplus, the Soviets would pay cash, the deal would help the U.S. balance of payments, and the nation’s allies were already selling U.S. grain to the Russians anyway. A more revealing argument lay buried in a letter that he sent to Congress in which he called the deal “one more hopeful sign that a peaceful world is both possible and beneficial to us all,” and said that prohibiting it would cause Soviet leaders to conclude that the United States was “either too hostile or too timid to take any further steps toward peace . . . and that the logical course for them to follow is a renewal [emphasis added] of the Cold War.”
A reporter asked him about Eisenhower’s recent statement that he was unclear about Goldwater’s stand on various issues. “I don’t think Senator Goldwater has been particularly deceptive,” he said. “I think he has made very clear what he’s opposed to. . . . I have gotten the idea. I think President Eisenhower will as time goes by.”
He danced around the question of whether Goldwater had sewn up the Republican nomination, but made his preference for running against him so obvious that a New York Times headline the next day would read, “President Nudges Goldwater’s Hat—Says He Thinks Senator Can Be G.O.P. Nominee.” His hope that Goldwater would win the nomination was an open secret. “Give me good old Barry,” he had told Fay, adding that then he could campaign without leaving the Oval Office. (He feared Governor Romney of Michigan the most. “No vice whatsoever, no smoking, no drinking,” he said to Fay. “Imagine someone we know going off for twenty-four to forty-eight hours to fast and meditate, awaiting a message from the Lord on whether to run or not to run. Does that sound like one of the old gang?”) He also preferred Goldwater because they had become friends while serving together in the Senate (Goldwater had praised his inaugural address, albeit condescendingly, saying, “God, I’d like to be able to do what that boy did there”), and he anticipated a clean campaign focused on their ideological differences. In fact, he felt so comfortable around Goldwater that when he arrived at the Oval Office for a meeting and found him sitting in his favorite rocking chair, he told him, “Keep your seat, Barry. And you can have this fucking job, too. If you want it.”
• • •
WINSTON CHURCHILL’S SON, RANDOLPH, was staying in Washington with Kay Halle. He called Kennedy on Tuesday to report that Prime Minister Macmillan had been rushed to a London hospital for an emergency prostate operation and would be resigning within twenty-four hours. Kennedy invited him to come to the White House with Halle after the press conference, and they arrived just as John was poking his head out of a secret door in the kneehole of the desk as his father said, “I’m a great big wolf and I’m going to eat you up in one bite!” Caroline walked into the room, her shoulders hunched like a miniature version of her father’s, and he told Halle, “You know, I’ve been taking care of the children because Jackie is away, and I’m having the most marvelous time.”
He invited Tretick and Bergquist to join them. They came in as John was careening merrily around the room in his pajamas. Bergquist called it “a sight to gladden the eye and camera.”
“What do you think of him?” Kennedy demanded. Before anyone answered, he asked, “Isn’t he a charge?”
He struck Tretick as more interested in what they thought of John than in the photographs. Bergquist did not usually warm to small children, but she thought the boy was “an instant beguiler” and “not gorgeous” but “friendly, uninhibited, and unspoiled.” Kennedy grabbed him, pulled up his pajama shirt, and began caressing the bare skin above his fanny, and she sensed a “joyous, funny, mutually fascinated, male-to-male, even sensuous” relationship.
John wiggled free and disappeared beneath the desk. He threw open the little door, poked his head out, and Tretick, almost faint with joy, took what he predicted would be “a hell of a picture.”
Churchill was already four sheets to the wind. He asked a steward for a bottle of scotch that Kennedy eyed nervously, fearful it might appear in one of the photographs. To distract Churchill from the bottle, he asked John to tell Churchill a secret. The boy whispered some unintelligible words into Churchill’s ear. Churchill slapped his head and exclaimed, “Oh no! No! No! No! Not that!” Bergquist and Tretick hung around on Thursday and Friday. They were there when John stood outside the Oval Office gaily chanting “G’myko! G’myko!” as the Soviet foreign minister conferred with his father, when he tried on Maxwell Taylor’s gold-braided hat and imitated a chimpanzee, and when he went racing through the West Wing after someone had said he was cute, shouting, “I’m cute! I’m cute!”
Bergquist claimed she was not a “gung-ho idolater” but still considered Kennedy “a fascinating human animal,” and “one of the smartest, quickest, funniest human beings” she knew. Because he was easily bored, she always saved her best jokes for him and came expecting lots of lighthearted banter. The Tretick photo shoot was different. She had not seen him in a year and sensed an unusual sadness and “a somber, sobering quality,” telling a friend that there had been something “remote and tragic” about him. (Nine months later she shared her impressions with Jackie, who said, “Oh, you caught that, because that was very true about him.”) The day after Tretick finished the shoot, Ted Sorensen told an interviewer that the president was “subject to moods” and sometimes discouraged by his inability to get things done as he would like. “He’s exuberant at times. He’s discouraged at times,” he explained. “There are events which interest him and those that bore him. There are those which make him sad. And nothing is done by anyone else to dispel them, I suppose.”
He had been riding an emotional roller coaster since the beginning of the summer. He had delivered his landmark American University and civil rights speeches, traveled to Germany and Ireland, and enjoyed the best weekends of his life on the Cape. Then had come the test ban treaty, the death of his son, the infighting among his advisers over Vietnam, his triumphant Western tour, and Jackie’s perilous cruise. By the time Bergquist saw him, it appeared unlikely that Congress would pass his tax-cut and civil rights bills before the end of the year, Khrushchev had yet to respond to his proposal for a joint lunar mission, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, the only foreign leader he counted as a genuine friend, was ill, and hearings into the Bobby Baker affair threatened to embroil him in the kind of scandal that had doomed Macmillan.
Bergquist was also shocked to find herself facing “a very serious preoccupied man who was obviously beginning to look middle-aged.” Kennedy monitored his appearance so carefully that he must have been aware of this, and it may have contributed to his moodiness. He weighed himself after every swim, and Powers sensed a correlation between his mood and his weight. He had recently complained to Fay that his face was showing his weight and he was getting what he called “full jowls.” (He should have been more concerned about his cholesterol, since an October 12 laboratory report showed it at 353, a dangerously high level.) Jackie’s secretary Mary Gallagher had detected some reddish highlights in his hair at his birthday party in May. Photographs taken later that summer show his hair flecked with gray, but by October she was noticing more highlights. Like all the Kennedys, he was a fanatical sun-worshipper. The phrase “a healthy tan” was common in the sixties, and a deep one helped refute the rumors that he was sickly. His tan had to be dark in order to be visible on black-and-white television, and during the campaign he had ordered Lincoln to schedule a day off every week, preferably at a beach. When he was a young man a friend had chided him for spending so much time in the sun at Palm Beach so he could “look so handsome at these parties you go to.” He had replied, “It’s not only that I want to look that way, but it makes me feel that way. It gives me confidence, it makes me feel healthy.”
He could keep up his tan during the winter at Palm Beach and during the summer on Cape Cod, but if being tanned really did make him happy, it made sense that he might feel lower in the autumn, when it was hurricane season in Florida and the sun in Hyannis Port was too weak to darken his skin.
• • •
AS SOON AS Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko arrived for a meeting on October 10, Kennedy said, “Why don’t we go out on to the terrace and talk one-to-one without interpreters?”
Gromyko spoke excellent English, so if Kennedy had merely wanted to hold a confidential conversation without interpreters, he could have sent them out of the room for a few minutes. He took Gromyko outside because what he wanted to say was so sensitive that he did not want to be overheard by Ambassador Dobrynin, Dean Rusk, or Llewellyn Thompson, who were also attending the meeting, or by any listening devices, including the microphone he had just activated. Rusk had displayed a similar caution when meeting with Gromyko at the United Nations the previous month. After reporting that the president wanted to build on the success of the test ban treaty, he had asked him, “Could we go for a ride out of town and carry on our conversation?” While walking along a suburban road without interpreters, Rusk told Gromyko that the president wanted to reduce the size of U.S. forces in Europe, news that would have dismayed America’s NATO allies. Gromyko later wrote that the issue of U.S. troop levels in Europe had been present “visibly or invisibly at almost every U.S.-Soviet meeting since the war,” and the fact that Kennedy was suddenly ready to discuss reducing U.S. forces had “seized our attention.”
Kennedy and Gromyko had met several times during his presidency, most recently during the Cuban missile crisis, when he had impressed Gromyko with his candor by admitting that the Bay of Pigs had been a mistake, telling him, “I don’t deny that the Cuban problem is a serious one, but I am restraining those who are in favor of actions which could lead to war.”
Standing with Gromyko on the terrace outside the Oval Office, he again spoke candidly. “The fact is, there are two groups of the American population which are not always pleased when relations between our two countries are eased,” he said. “One group consists of people who are always opposed to improvement for ideological reasons. . . . The other group are people of ‘a particular nationality’ [Gromyko assumed he was speaking of the ‘Jewish lobby’] who think that, always and under all circumstances, the Kremlin will support the Arabs and be the enemy of Israel. . . . That is the reality. But I think it is still possible to improve relations, and I want Moscow to know that.”
Gromyko said the Kremlin understood his situation, and that the positive reaction of the American public to the resolution of the Cuban crisis had shown that these two groups were a minority.
“I just wanted you to know some of the difficulties the President of the United States has to face when dealing with the questions of Soviet-U.S. relations.” He also wanted Khrushchev to understand why, having signed the test ban treaty, installed the hotline, approved the wheat deal, proposed a joint moon mission, and entered into talks to ban nuclear weapons from space, he felt it necessary to slow down the pace for a while. His caution was a good example of what Walt Rostow considered one of his greatest strengths: a sense of history consisting “of a sense of the scale and timing of the problems he confronted, versus the capacities . . . of the United States.”
He and Gromyko rejoined the others and held an unproductive discussion about arms control and a nonaggression pact, but agreed on a direct New York–Moscow air route and the establishment of consulates in Leningrad and Chicago—secondary issues but ones keeping the atmosphere of détente alive. “I don’t want you to get discouraged,” Kennedy said after they finished. “You may not be conscious of much progress where you sit, but we’ve been pulling and hauling around the United States for the last three months. . . . And we think, for us, we’ve made some progress in our relations with the Soviet Union. We may not get the German question disposed of and may not have solved all the matters, but considering some of the difficulties that both of our countries face—and internally and externally—it seems to me we’ve done pretty well. So I’m rather encouraged, not discouraged. I don’t want you to be discouraged.”
“Well, there is improvement in some things,” Gromyko conceded.
Referring to Khrushchev’s desire for more agreements, Kennedy said, “There is only a certain tempo which you can move in these matters.” After mentioning the test ban and the wheat deal, he added, “Do you realize that in the summer of 1961, the Congress unanimously passed resolutions against trade with the Soviets and now we’re going ahead, we hope, with this very large trade agreement that represents what’s changed in American policy. . . . That’s progress. We’re talking about next week with going ahead with this matter on space, we’re talking about getting the civil air agreement settled, we’ve got good communications. . . . I agree we haven’t settled Berlin but considering that we’ve got a lot of problems, we’ve—you’ve taken some of your troops out of Cuba so it’s less of a problem for us here—that’s some progress.”
“You are right, Mr. President. There is a change in the atmosphere.”
As they were talking, one of Kennedy’s children shouted “Daddy!” He told Gromyko to open the door so they could come in.
“Want to say hello to the minister?” he asked.
“They are very popular in our country,” Gromyko said.
“His chief is the one who sent you Pushinka,” he reminded them. “You know that? You have the puppies.”
A reporter meeting the usually dour Gromyko afterward described him being in a relatively jovial and loquacious mood. He even cracked a joke about flying to the moon instead of returning to Moscow. The Washington Post took his high spirits as a sign that the Soviet Union was “eager to maintain a show of forward momentum in improving relations.”
The same day that Kennedy met Gromyko, he received a letter from Khrushchev that was published in Pravda and U.S. newspapers. Khrushchev wrote that it was important “to develop further the success we have achieved, to seek solutions of other ripe international questions,” and expressed hope that the test ban treaty “should become the beginning of a sharp turn toward broad relaxation of international tension.” Ten days later, the State Department drafted a reply from Kennedy that read, “I am convinced then that the possibilities for an improvement in the international situation are real.” The opportunities might be “fragile ones,” he said, but the two powers should “move forward, lest our hopes of progress be jeopardized.” Kennedy signed off on the letter, and McGeorge Bundy scrawled on its bottom, “Approved. Let’s get it out.” The State Department never sent it, an inexplicable error not coming to light until December. A “clerical misunderstanding” was blamed, an explanation that strains credulity.
Earl Blaik and Kenneth Royall followed Gromyko into the Oval Office to report on their mission to Birmingham. Mayor Boutwell had brought an all-white delegation to the airport to meet them, and after some perfunctory handshakes had declared that blame for his city’s racial strife lay with “professional outsiders who thrive on the fruits of tension and unrest.” Boutwell had also called their mission “advisory”—meaning he would not be bound by their recommendations—and accompanied them to an exclusive whites-only club for lunch.
During the next several days they had met five hundred prominent whites and blacks, but never in an integrated group. (They may have also informed Kennedy that while they were in the city two bombs exploded in a middle-class black neighborhood, a Klan wizard posted bail for two white men charged with possessing dynamite, and Alabama state troopers flew Confederate battle flags while patrolling black neighborhoods.) In an effort to lighten their dispiriting report, Blaik asked Kennedy, “How is your sense of humor?” and went on to describe a sign he had seen proclaiming “Kennedy for King—Goldwater for President.” There was a long pause until Kennedy got the “joke”—the sign had meant he was “for” the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
• • •
IN DECEMBER 1955, six years before Kennedy established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and gave it the task of making recommendations “for overcoming discrimination in government and private employment on the basis of sex,” he had sat by the pool in Palm Beach reading the second volume of a biography of his hero Lord Melbourne, the nineteenth-century British statesman known for his hedonism, intellect, and aristocratic style, and writing in a notebook that one reason he found European history more interesting than American was that American women were by comparison “not glamorous.” Instead, they were “either prostitutes or housewives,” who did not “play much of a role in [the] cultural or intellectual life of [the] country.” It was not that surprising an observation for a man who had grown up at a time when most women were housewives, and who had attended an all-male prep school and college, served in a military that segregated the sexes, and spent fourteen years in Congress with few female members.
The man who received the eighty-six-page report from the Status of Women Commission at an East Room ceremony on Friday, October 11, was not that different from the misogynist of 1955. The previous month he had welcomed a delegation of female delegates to the United Nations General Assembly to the White House. Their spokesman, the elderly Daw Mya Sein of Burma, answered his greeting by saying, “Thank you very much, Mr. President, for receiving us here today. And I hope in a few years’ time that a woman president will be standing just where you are now, welcoming the men delegates to the United Nations.” Without missing a beat, he replied, “Madam, you are raising the standard of rebellion in the royal pavilion.”
His quick comeback impressed the U.S. delegate Marietta Tree, but she was disappointed when he followed it by saying, “I never know whether women want to be referred to as women or as politicians.” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Katie Louchheim muttered, “If they are politicians, they don’t care.” He had once made a similar observation to Tree, saying, “I don’t know how to treat women politicians—as women or as politicians,” so he obviously considered it a clever riposte. Tree had the same reaction as Louchheim, that women “just thought of themselves as people involved in politics.” It confirmed her impression that Kennedy was “quite uneasy with women who were involved with politics,” and that “for the most part, women were a necessary adjunct to his life, he simply enjoyed their beauty and charms without particularly [enjoying] . . . their intellectual side or their counsel.” Nancy Dickerson had a similar take and thought that although he had “great sex appeal” he was also “the complete male chauvinist.” He loved being around women and sometimes asked for their opinions, she said, but “thought it ridiculous to pay them the same [attention] as men.” Earlier in his term she had shared a flight with him on Air Force One to New York, where he was speaking at a convention of women in radio and television. He showed her his speech and asked for suggestions. She urged him to say, “Let’s get women off the weather beat and let them be newscasters.” He looked shocked, she recalled, “as if I was certifiable.”
Jackie encouraged his prejudices, once asking him why women like Madame Nhu and Clare Boothe Luce (the former congresswoman, U.S. ambassador to Italy, and wife of the publisher Henry Luce), who were both obviously “attractive to men,” also had “this queer thing for power”—an attribute that she called “unattractive in a woman.” He told her, “It’s strange, but it’s really because they resent getting their power through men.” As a result, he thought, they ended up hating men.
While he was in New York that autumn Kennedy had asked the noted journalist Clayton Fritchey, who was serving on Adlai Stevenson’s staff, to explain why Stevenson appealed to so many women, Jackie included. “Look, I may not be the best-looking guy in the world,” Kennedy said, “but, for God’s sake, Adlai’s half-bald, he’s got a paunch, he wears his clothes in a dumpy kind of way. What’s he got that I haven’t got?” The difference, Fritchey explained, was that although they both loved women, Adlai also liked them, and gave them the impression that they were “intelligent and worth listening to.”
“I don’t say you’re wrong, but I’m not sure I can go to those lengths,” he admitted.
Assistant Secretary of Labor Esther Peterson, the highest-ranking woman in the administration and vice chair of his Commission on Women, thought his attitudes toward women compared poorly with those of Bobby, who never gave her the feeling that he was treating her differently because she was a woman. But when he walked into the East Room to accept Peterson’s report, he immediately noticed that men had taken all the front-row seats while the women sat or stood in the rear. He said, “Gentlemen, we are here to talk about the status of women,” and led two female legislators to seats that men had hastily evacuated. That accomplished, he offered the women a few extemporaneous banalities, praising their report as “very useful” and declaring, “I think we ought to look as a society at what our women are doing and the opportunities before them.” Flummoxed about what else to say, he recited his favorite all-purpose line, recounting how the Greeks had defined happiness as “the full use of your powers along lines of excellence,” and wondered if American society afforded women this opportunity, although the report that he was praising proved that it did not.
• • •
TRETICK WAS ECSTATIC about the photographs but still lacked a good color shot for the cover. On Friday, he persuaded Kennedy to sit on a bench in the Rose Garden with his son, but the light was harsh, the boy restless, and the session ended abruptly when Taylor and McNamara arrived for a briefing. After Kennedy brushed off Tretick’s request for another sitting, Bergquist asked if he had seen the recent photograph of the Nixons in Berlin. She said it showed the Nixons and their girls standing “like waxwork dummies” and gazing at the Wall with “glazed, uneasy smiles.” If he would give Tretick one more session, she’d bet his photographs could easily beat that sorry Nixon picture.
“Was it really that bad?” he asked, grinning broadly before inviting them to fly to Camp David in the morning so Tretick could try again.
Schlesinger ran into him on Friday evening, and asked after Jackie. He said she was enjoying herself and admitted having pressured Roosevelt into accompanying her. As Schlesinger was leaving, he called out wistfully, “What are you doing tonight?” Schlesinger noted in his diary, “I hate to repeat the cliché about the loneliness of the job, but it is a lonely job.”
John and Caroline had flown to Camp David the night before and met him at the landing pad. He had brought a life-sized toy parrot with a tape recorder embedded inside that he hoped would distract John long enough for Tretick to get his cover shot. He placed it on the tarmac in front of the helicopter, pushed a button, and the parrot said, in Kennedy’s flat Boston accent, “My name is Polly Parrot. Would you like to fly with me in my helicopter?” John answered, “Hi, Poll Parrot, would you like a stick of gum?” and dashed off before Tretick could raise his camera.
Father and son finally posed together on a wrought-iron bench. John stood with his hand on his father’s shoulder, and both flashed their toothy Kennedy smiles. It would appear on the cover of the December 3, 1963, issue, available on newsstands November 18. Kennedy obtained copies of the photographs several weeks earlier and showed them off around the White House, becoming “quite a bore on the subject,” according to Tretick. Kennedy had expected Jackie to be furious. Instead, she said wearily, “No, Jack. I guess it’s your year. You can use the children any way you want, and if you want me to pose in the bathtub for photographs, I suppose I should do that, to help out.”
Her cruise was proving as embarrassing as he had feared. She was photographed sightseeing in Istanbul, exploring ruins in Crete, and zipping around on speedboats. A Newsweek article titled “Caesar’s Wife” suggested that the trip had exhausted her immunity from criticism. Other articles reported that the “Millionaire Greek ship owner” had ordered forty-four pounds of lobster for a gala shipboard dinner and given her command of his “floating pleasure dome.” The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced “all-night parties in foreign lands,” and a GOP congressman criticized her for accepting “the lavish hospitality of a man who had so defrauded the American public.”
Communication proved difficult. The Greek switchboards dropped connections and one late-night call was routed to a Mrs. Kennedy married to a Foreign Service officer in Athens. After a paparazzo with a telephoto lens snapped her in a bikini, Kennedy called, read her some of the articles, and suggested she come home early. When she protested that it would be difficult to get ashore, he said, “You’re a good swimmer, Jackie.”
Her friend Princess Irene Galitzine was also aboard, giving the cruise an additional jet-set patina. Galitzine was descended from Russian nobility and had become one of Italy’s most famous designers on the strength of launching a line of “palazzo pajamas,” colorful silk evening trousers that had become the rage after Claudia Cardinale wore a pair in the first Pink Panther movie. The Italian industrialist Gianni Agnelli had introduced the two women during Jackie’s holiday in Amalfi, and Galitzine had been mesmerized by how her irregular teeth, large mouth, and big feet added up to something “inexplicably fascinating and beautiful.” During the cruise she noticed that Jackie would sometimes lock herself in her cabin after dinner with a glass of champagne. Jackie explained that she was writing to her husband and when she did this she felt as if she were talking to him. She expressed sentiments in her letters that she found too hard to tell him in person, writing, “I loved you from the first moment I saw you,” and “If I hadn’t married you my life would have been tragic because the definition of tragedy is a waste. But ten years later I love you so much more.” In similar letters from Italy she had written, “I think that I am lucky to miss you—I know that I always exaggerate but I pity everybody else who is married,” and concluding, “I’ll show you how much I love you when I get back.”
The cruise ended on October 13, but she decided to extend her holiday by accepting an invitation from King Hassan of Morocco to visit Marrakech. The king sent his private jet to collect her and installed her in a guest palace. Kennedy asked a military aide to ascertain its size and appearance, no doubt praying that it would be small and modest. She shopped in the bazaars, admiring brass pots, rugs, and leather goods that the New York Times speculated would be sent to her as gifts. It was also reported that the king had flown in hairdressers from Paris who had given her “a Parisian style to suit her personality.”