WASHINGTON, NEW YORK, AND ATOKA
Bundy woke Kennedy just after 3:00 a.m. to report that the South Vietnamese generals had launched their coup. Three hours later, a CIA cable described “heavy fighting including armor, small arms, and possible some light artillery vicinity Palace as of 1530 hours [Saigon time].” At an early morning White House staff meeting, Forrestal called the putsch “much better than anyone would have thought possible.” Bundy said the action was an “acceptable type of military coup.”
Kennedy convened his advisers in the Cabinet Room, and after hearing more optimistic reports he said, “I think we have to make it clear this is not an American coup.” Among the cables to Lodge that he approved that morning was one urging him to persuade the generals to bear seven points in mind. These included: “Practical evidence of determination to prosecute war with renewed vigor; Reprisals at minimum; Safe passage for family [of Diem and Nhu] to exile; Humane treatment for arrestees.”
He was presiding at a meeting on Saturday morning when Forrestal handed him a telegram reporting that Diem and Nhu had committed suicide after surrendering. He jumped to his feet and rushed from the room with what Taylor called “a look of shock and dismay on his face which I have never seen before.” He was in turmoil all day. Schlesinger thought he looked “somber and shaken.” Forrestal believed that the deaths “shook him personally,” bothering him “as a moral and religious matter.” Jackie noticed that he had “that awful look that he had at the time of the Bay of Pigs,” adding, “I mean he was just—just wounded.” As shocked as he was by Diem’s death, he could not have been entirely surprised. He had, after all, sent Macdonald on a secret mission to warn Diem that his life was in danger, and would later tell Cardinal Spellman of New York that he had known that Diem might be killed but could not control the situation.
He believed that devout Catholics like Diem and Nhu would not have committed suicide, and told McNamara, “We must bear a good deal of responsibility for it.” He ranted to Fay about Madame Nhu. “She’s responsible for the death of that kind man,” he said. “You know it’s so totally unnecessary to have that kind man die because that bitch stuck her nose in and boiled up the whole situation down there.” While Jackie was at Wexford, he invited Mary Meyer to the White House for the first time since the previous spring. She signed in around one o’clock and stayed several hours. They may have resumed their affair, but it is also possible that he simply wanted her there to comfort him. He had not taken up again with Marlene Dietrich when she visited in September nor continued his affair with Mimi Beardsley after Patrick’s death, so his encounter with Meyer may have also been innocent.
By the time he reconvened his advisers that afternoon, it appeared that Diem and Nhu had been executed while riding in the back of an army personnel carrier. “There is some question in some of our minds as to how much we want to know about this,” Hilsman said. “It’s becoming more and more clear that this is an assassination.” McCone agreed, saying, “I would suggest that we not get into—into this story.” After learning that General Duong Van (“Big Minh”) Minh, who had led the coup, may have ordered the executions, Kennedy said in a soft voice, “Pretty stupid.” A moment later he asked, “We haven’t got any report on what public reaction [in Vietnam] was to the assassination, have we?”
“Jubilance in the streets,” Hilsman said, adding that Lodge had been cheered publicly and might finally get a chance to be elected president . . . of South Vietnam.
“I’m not sure about that,” Kennedy said.
After more speculation about the popularity of the coup, he asked, “What are we gonna say about the, uh, death of Diem and Nhu? We’re not gonna say anything, right?”
Someone remarked that reporters were being told that the government was receiving conflicting reports about their deaths.
“We’ve already got an unfortunate event,” he said. “Nonetheless, it’d be regrettable if it were ascribed, unless the evidence is clear . . . to Big Minh and the responsible council of generals. I don’t want it wrapped around him if we can help it.”
Hilsman speculated that more information about those responsible for the murders of Diem and Nhu would surface within the next forty-eight hours.
“I’m sure Lodge must be aware that this is an unfortunate matter,” Kennedy said, “and I suppose next they’re going to make every effort to disassociate Big Minh and Conein [the CIA officer who had been the principal intermediary with the generals plotting the coup].” Speaking of Minh, he added, “If there was not responsibility on his part, that should be made clear.”
“In other words, get a story and stick to it,” Hilsman said.
Stepping back from what might be construed as an attempt to cover up Minh’s role in the assassinations, he said, “It ought to be a true story . . . if possible.”
• • •
HE HAD DICTATED the college honors thesis that became his first book, Why England Slept, and dictated his contributions to his second, Profiles in Courage. When he began dictating his first speech to the House of Representatives, his secretary had expected “this green young legislator” to stumble over his words. Instead, she said, he sat back in his chair and a “stream of beautiful language” just “flowed out.” Audiotapes of him dictating his Senate speeches show him seldom pausing or repeating himself, and delivering sentences shorn at birth of adjectives and qualifiers. When he could not dictate, he scribbled notes and delivered extemporaneous speeches that resembled his dictation, with “the words rolling out of his mouth as if he had written them weeks before,” Lincoln said. He dictated his announcement that he was running for president two hours before delivering it and while a barber was cutting his hair, and dictated passages for his inaugural address while flying to Palm Beach. On November 4, he dictated some material for his memoirs. He said, “One, two, three, four,” to check that the Dictaphone was working, then added the date because he assumed this would be one of many such recordings on this subject.
Diem’s assassination had prompted him to consider his memoirs, perhaps because he knew that history would judge him harshly and he wanted to get his version of events down while it was fresh in his mind. He began, “Over the weekend, the coup in Saigon took place. It culminated three months of conversation about a coup (comma), conversation which divided the government here and in Saigon.” He listed those opposing the coup—Taylor, Bobby, McNamara, and McCone—and those favoring it—Harriman, Ball, Hilsman, and Forrestal—and repeated his comment to McNamara that “we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it.” He blamed it on the August 26 cable, and said, “In my judgment that wire was badly drafted (comma), it should never have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given my consent to it without a roundtable conference in which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views.” If this was an accurate preview of his memoirs, they would have been memorably honest and unsparing.
Two minutes into his dictation, John came into the room and began shouting. Relieved to be distracted from accepting responsibility for his most ineptly managed crisis since the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy said, “Wanna say something? Wanna say something? Hello . . .”
“Hello,” John obliged.
He quizzed his son about the seasons, asking him, “Why do the leaves fall?” “Why do the leaves turn green?”
After John left, he said, “I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu,” praised Diem as “an extraordinary character” who had “held his country together,” and called his death “particularly abhorrent.” Because he could not bear to do anything for very long, his dictation lasted for only five minutes and twenty-one seconds.
He may have been atoning for his complicity in Nhu’s and Diem’s murders when he sent Secretary of the Interior Luther Hodges an uncharacteristically tough memorandum on Monday complaining about what he called an “inexcusable” outbreak of polio in America’s Trust Territories in Micronesia. He demanded to know why, when the polio vaccine was widely available in the United States, “no action was undertaken between 1958 and 1963 when the spread of the disease became acute,” and if “there is a difference in treatment for United States citizens in this country and the people for whom the United States is responsible in the Trust Territory.” It was a scandal, but the fact he chose to address it today, and in such strong terms, and to demand that Hodges “expedite a complete investigation into the reason why the United States Government did not meet its responsibility in this area,” suggests good works atoning for sin.
Also on Monday, Byron Skelton, the Democratic National Committeeman for Texas, sent Bobby a newspaper clipping headlined “5 Flags Upside-Down.” The flags were outside the Dallas home of General Edwin Walker, who had been forced out of the Army in 1961 for disseminating right-wing propaganda to troops under his command in Germany. He was flying them to protest U.S. membership in the United Nations and the decision by Dallas officials to apologize to Stevenson. In a covering letter, Skelton wrote, “Frankly I am worried about President Kennedy’s proposed visit to Dallas. You will note that General Walker says that ‘Kennedy is a liability to the free world.’ A man who would make this kind of statement is capable of doing harm to the President. I would feel better if the President’s itinerary did not include Dallas. Please give this your earnest consideration.”
While reviewing foreign policy issues with Bundy on Monday, Kennedy said he favored “pushing toward an opening toward Cuba” that would take Castro “out of the Soviet fold.” That same day, Attwood called Bundy’s deputy, Gordon Chase, to report that he had held further conversations with the Cubans about what he called “the accommodation approach to Castro” but did not want to discuss them on the phone. He did say, “The general tone seemed to be that Castro is interested, that other people in the [Cuban] hierarchy are opposed, and that the problem is sticky one.”
On Tuesday, Attwood briefed Bundy and Chase in person about developments since his September meeting with Lechuga. He reported that following further conversations and telephone calls between himself, Lechuga, Lisa Howard of ABC, and Castro’s confidant Dr. Rene Vallejo, the Cubans had decided against sending a senior official from Havana to participate in secret talks at the United Nations. Vallejo had called Howard to reaffirm that Castro was interested in the talks but could not leave Cuba to participate in them personally. On October 31, Vallejo had told Howard that Castro wanted to send a plane to Mexico City to collect a U.S. official (presumably Attwood) and fly him to a private airport in Cuba. Bundy and Chase asked Attwood to write a memorandum for the president summarizing all this. Bundy added that the president was more interested than the State Department in exploring the Cuban overture, but wanted a preliminary meeting at the UN between him and a Cuban official to agree on an agenda. At a Tuesday White House meeting on Cuba that the president did not attend, the CIA’s deputy director for plans, Richard Helms, proposed that they slow down the pace of the Attwood initiative, “war game” the peace scenario, and “look at it from all possible angles” before making contact with Castro.
• • •
KENNEDY WAS IN AN EXPANSIVE MOOD when Ben and Tony Bradlee arrived on Tuesday evening for another last-minute dinner party. Although he had kept the Baker investigation from metastasizing into another Profumo scandal, it remained on his mind, and he invited everyone to guess who the “hidden Profumo” in his administration might be, knowing full well it was himself. Salinger and Gilpatric were among the names tossed out.
He recounted his luncheon with Hoover and spoke about seeing the photograph of Rometsch as if it had been the first time he had laid eyes on her. “Boy, the dirt he [Hoover] has on those senators,” he said, shaking his head. “You wouldn’t believe it.”
Calls bringing good news kept interrupting the dinner. Another brief Berlin autobahn standoff had ended with the Soviets backing down, and early results in the off-year elections showed Democrats winning important contests in Kentucky and Philadelphia, although with narrower margins than Kennedy would have liked. “The way things have been going,” he said, “to win in Philadelphia, Kentucky, and the autobahn adds up to a pretty good day.”
He needled the Bradlees about their failure to enroll their daughter in a snobby dancing school, claiming that his father would have told him to leave town rather than accept such a snub. While puffing on one of the three cigars he chain-smoked that evening, he raised the surgeon general’s long-awaited report on the link between cancer and smoking, saying he was concerned that it would reduce federal tax receipts and harm the economies of tobacco-growing states. He complained about a news photograph showing U.S. servicemen dancing with bar girls in Saigon. “If I was running things in Saigon,” he said, “I’d have those G.I.s in the front lines tomorrow.” A leftist government had recently assumed power in the Dominican Republic, and he was torn about whether to order the CIA to orchestrate an antigovernment student demonstration there. Bradlee asked how he would feel if the Soviets did the same thing here. He had no answer to this.
He invited Ambassador David Ormsby-Gore to dinner the following evening. After the test ban treaty had been initialed in Moscow, Ormsby-Gore had spent a weekend in Hyannis Port with him and Bobby, discussing further steps to improve U.S.-Soviet relations. Bobby had said that his brother should visit the Soviet Union, and over dinner on Tuesday, Kennedy reminded Ormsby-Gore of that conversation. “You know, I have made up my mind that one of the things I really must do is go to the Soviet Union,” he said. “I believe that this would be in everybody’s interest—whether I can do it before the presidential elections next year may be a bit doubtful . . . but sometime I am determined to go.”
An article by Attwood appearing in the November 5 issue of Look titled “We Face a New Kind of World” claimed, “On balance, the state of the world, as seen from Washington, looks considerably more hopeful than it did three years ago.” Attwood argued that the end of the European colonial empires had brought about “one of the most revolutionary periods in human history.” During this period, he wrote, “the supremacy of the world’s white, Christian minority” was vanishing and Americans should accept that “being the strongest power on earth doesn’t mean that we can impose our system or our way of life on other countries.” Kennedy liked the article so much that he asked the Democratic National Committee chairman, John Bailey, to send a copy to every member of the Senate and House, although one wonders how he squared Attwood’s warning about imposing our system on other nations with promoting bogus student demonstrations in the Dominican Republic, and supporting the sabotage campaign of Cuban exile groups. Like many great men in the making, he wanted to be inspirational and successful—high-minded in public and pragmatic in private.
Hours after asking Bailey to distribute Attwood’s lofty article, he flew to New York to accept the Protestant Council’s first annual “Family of Man” citation, bestowed for his support of human rights. He had been battling Congress over cuts to his foreign aid budget and used his speech to the council to defend foreign assistance on practical and humanitarian grounds, painting it as an effective cold war weapon and a moral imperative. He criticized congressmen who found it “politically convenient to denounce both foreign aid and the Communist menace,” and enumerated its economic benefits—a half million jobs created at home and the promotion of U.S. exports. But moments later he was insisting that “the rich must help the poor. The industrialized nations must help the developing nations.” Referring to the Marshall Plan and the robust foreign aid program of the Eisenhower years, he said, “Surely the Americans of the 1960s can do half as well as the Americans of the 1950s. . . . I do not want it said of us what T. S. Eliot said of others some years ago: ‘These were a decent people. Their only monument: the asphalt road and a thousand lost golf balls.”
At a black-tie party afterward, William Styron was surprised to see him “quite alone and looking abandoned.” He greeted Styron and his wife, Rose, with “a grand smile,” Styron remembered, as if they were “long-lost loved ones,” and asked, “How did they get you to come here? They had a hard enough time getting me.” He was in an amiable mood, but Styron detected “an undercurrent of seriousness, almost an agitation” when he spoke about civil rights. He asked Styron if he was acquainted with any Negro historians and if he knew the black authors James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, and if he thought they might accept an invitation to the White House. Recalling their Labor Day conversation about the Nat Turner rebellion, he said, “What a great idea for a novel. I hope it’s done soon.” Styron felt himself being swept away by his charm, “overtaken by a grand effervescence” that he compared to “being bathed in sparkling water.” Kennedy was distracted, turned away, and Styron never saw him again.
• • •
BY THE TIME KENNEDY spent his third straight weekend at Wexford, he had either changed his mind about the house or decided to embrace it for Jackie’s sake. Salinger informed reporters that the family liked it so much that they had decided to enlarge the stables and add a wing with more guest rooms and servants’ quarters.
He arrived at Wexford early on Saturday afternoon with the Bradlees and the photographer Cecil Stoughton. Jackie had organized an informal horse show to entertain them, but the hill leading to the house was so steep and the road so rutted from days of rain that none of her friends’ horse vans could make it, leaving her and Caroline as the only performers. It was a gorgeous day, sunny and cool. He and the Bradlees sat on the stone wall of the patio, drinking Bloody Marys and watching Jackie jump hurdles in the meadow below. Later they sat against the wall of the house, sheltered from the wind, their faces tipped toward the weak November sun. Jackie led John’s pony, Leprechaun, up from the meadow and handed her husband some sugar cubes to feed him. When the pony nudged him onto his side, looking for more sugar, he threw an arm over his head. As Jackie and the Bradlees collapsed in hysterics, he shouted at Stoughton, “Are you getting this, Captain? You’re about to see a president trampled by a horse.”
Stoughton also filmed him teaching Caroline how to swing a golf club, and John marching across the lawn, wearing an oversized helmet and carrying a toy rifle on his shoulder. He stopped to salute his mother with his left hand. She knelt down in her riding boots and jodhpurs to show him how to do it correctly, using his right. Tomorrow Daddy would be taking him to a ceremony (Veterans Day) where he would see real soldiers, she explained. They would be saluting Daddy, so perhaps he would want to salute him, too. Kennedy was concerned about John’s fascination with guns and the military but reluctantly indulged it, buying him toy guns, letting him attend military ceremonies, and telling General Clifton, “I guess we all go through that. He just sees more of the real thing.”
The family attended Sunday Mass at St. Stephen the Martyr Church in Middleburg and heard Father Albert Pereira preach a homily about Christian death and the high cost of elaborate funerals. In a nod to the president, he said, “The Saints today are the peacemakers.” The church had opened in April and was purpose-built for the First Family, with a soundproof and bulletproof usher’s room where the president could take calls. Pereira was one of the few clergymen with whom Kennedy felt comfortable discussing Catholic dogma and his faith (another was Cardinal Cushing), perhaps because he was an outspoken civil rights advocate who had proved his courage by playing a key role in integrating Middleburg’s lunch counters. Before St. Stephen’s opened, Kennedy had attended Pereira’s services at the Middleburg Community Center, often arriving early for a private theological conversation. On November 10, Pereira gave him a Bible that he would carry to Texas, and that Johnson would use to take the oath of office.
Marie Ridder often went riding with Jackie and had known her and Jack for years. When she stopped at Wexford during one of these fall weekends (most likely the last one), Kennedy complimented the house within Jackie’s hearing, and she thought they seemed “very cozy” together. Bill Walton confirmed her impression that Jack and Jackie’s relationship had improved when they dined together a few days later, telling her that Jackie had taken him aside to say, “I think we’re going to make it. I think we’re going to be a couple. I’ve won.”