WASHINGTON
Afront-page article in the Sunday, October 20, New York Times by the noted journalist Homer Bigart that described the desperate poverty in eastern Kentucky had left Kennedy so dismayed that it was almost all he wanted to talk about with Walter Heller on Monday. Bigart reported that unemployed coal miners and subsistence farmers faced “another winter of idleness and grinding poverty,” and wrote of “the pinched faces of hungry children,” “listless defeated men,” a tar-paper-shack school “unfit for cattle” where “daylight shone through gaping holes between rotting planks,” and “pot-bellied and anemic” children hauling water from a creek “fouled with garbage and discarded mattresses,” so hungry they ate the dirt from chimneys.
Kennedy had witnessed poverty like this while campaigning in the 1960 West Virginia primary. Although he had seen wretched people in postwar Berlin, Asia, and Latin America, West Virginia was the first time he had faced abject poverty in his own country, and he often referred to the “blight” of poverty in the state during the general election, speaking about children sharing their school lunches with their parents, and families receiving “surplus food packages and no hope for the future.” He delivered an inaugural address with more references to poverty, hunger, and suffering than those given by FDR, Eisenhower, Truman, or any president to follow. After declaring that “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life,” he had pledged to “assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty.” His first official act as president had been to sign an executive order doubling the food rations supplied to four million poor Americans. Hunger and poverty continued to concern him, and in his 1963 State of the Union address he had said, “Tax reduction alone is not enough . . . to improve the lives of thirty-two million Americans who live on the outskirts of poverty,” “The quality of American life must keep pace with the quality of American goods,” and “This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.”
In the spring of 1963, Heller had sent him a memorandum titled “Progress and Poverty,” warning that America was experiencing a “drastic slowdown in the rate at which the economy is taking people out of poverty.” Throughout the spring and summer he and Heller discussed how to remedy this. Heller admitted that although the tax cut might create several million jobs it would not help the poorest of the poor—“those caught in a web of illiteracy, lack of skills, poor health, and squalor.” He gave Kennedy an economic and statistical analysis of this group and suggested an “attack on poverty.” At a cabinet meeting that fall, Kennedy announced that “disadvantaged groups other than Negroes now deserve our attention,” and after reading the testimony Heller was proposing to give to the Senate Finance Committee in support of the tax cut, he said, “Walter, first we’re going to get your tax cut, and then we’re going to get my expenditure program [his attack on poverty].”
He told Heller during their meeting on October 21 that in light of the Bigart article he had decided that attacking poverty would be a major theme of his reelection campaign, and he planned on traveling to poverty-stricken areas to “arouse the American conscience.” Heller wrote in a memorandum, “It’s perfectly clear that he is aroused by this, and if we could really produce a program to fill the bill, he would be inclined to run with it.”
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GOOD HOUSEKEEPING MAGAZINE had commissioned the best-selling author and columnist Jim Bishop to write “A Day in the Life of President Kennedy.” Bishop arrived at the White House on Monday with his wife, Kelly, puzzled that the president had agreed to let them snoop around and interview his staff and family for an article appearing in a magazine that even he dismissed as “a publication for women, replete with recipes, patterns, deodorants, and articles about what to do with your cheating husband.” Bishop probably didn’t want to admit that Kennedy was cooperating because he anticipated an article as uncritical and flattering as his “A Day in the Life of President Eisenhower.”
Bishop arrived at the White House a skeptic who believed the problem with Kennedy was that “one never knew how much of the warmth was real.” He had expected a perfunctory meeting lasting a few minutes. Instead, Kennedy stuck out his hand and said “Jim,” as if they were old friends, and “Kelly” before he could introduce his wife. He suggested that since Bishop’s ancestors had also come from County Wexford he might like to see his photographs of his recent trip there. As they leafed through his scrapbook he smiled at Kelly and said, “He ought to get a book out of this, don’t you think?”
Bishop protested that he was writing only an article.
“Stretch it a little and you’ll have a book.” Turning to Kelly, he said, “You speak to him.”
Jackie would have resented Bishop’s intrusion at the best of times. His presence this week was particularly unwelcome. She had returned from her trip feeling guilty and eager to build on the new intimacy she sensed between herself and her husband. A number of observers had noticed their relationship changing for the better. The reporter Helen Thomas thought they had “grown closer” after Patrick’s death and “appeared genuinely affectionate toward each other.” Roswell Gilpatric would later say, “You could see now that he liked being with her. . . . I think their marriage was really beginning to work out.” Jackie agreed, telling Father McSorley, “It took us a very long time for us to work everything out, but we did, and we were about to have a real life together.” Because these statements were made after Dallas, they cannot escape the suspicion that they were motivated by a desire to paint the couple’s final days together as happy ones. There may have been some wishful thinking and exaggeration, but there is enough contemporaneous evidence to confirm their essential truth.
On Monday, with her privacy already under assault from Jim and Kelly Bishop, Jackie called J. B. West into her bedroom and said in her trademark whisper, “Oh, Mr. West, I’ve gotten myself into something. Can you help me get out of it?” She explained that although she had invited Princess Galitzine to stay at the White House, “now we’ve changed our minds,” and she wanted to rescind the invitation so she and the president could spend the next several nights alone. “Could you help us cook up something so we can get out of having her as a houseguest?” she asked. Before he could answer, she continued, “Would you fix up the Queen’s Room and the Lincoln Room so that it looks like we’re still decorating them, and I’ll show her our guest rooms are not available?”
West had the furniture covered with drop cloths, the rugs rolled up, and buckets of white paint and dirty brushes set out. As a finishing touch, he scattered around ashtrays filled with butts left by the imaginary workmen. When Princess Galitzine came to dinner, Kennedy walked her down the East Hall, stopping to point out the renovations in the Queen’s Room and say, “And you see, this is where you would have spent the night if Jackie hadn’t been redecorating again.”