ATOKA, ARLINGTON, AND WASHINGTON
Monday was “Daddies Day” at the White House school, when fathers attended classes with their children. Kennedy missed Caroline’s first class, but before going to Arlington for Veterans Day ceremonies he joined the students at recess and praised their French teacher, Jacqueline Hirsh, for the “many miracles” she had worked with the children.
It was an ideal day for a military pageant, with bright sunshine and a brisk wind snapping the flags. He left John outside the amphitheater but soon changed his mind, telling a Secret Service agent, “I think he’ll be lonely out there,” and asking him to bring the boy inside. An agent who had seen the First Lady teaching John how to salute at Wexford leaned down as the color guard saluted the president and whispered, “Okay. Time to salute Daddy.” This time, John used his right hand.
Kennedy found the ceremony so moving that he remained throughout the speeches instead of returning to the White House. While strolling down the rows of white gravestones with Representative Hale Boggs afterward, he said, “This is one of the really beautiful places on earth. I could stay here forever.” Arlington remained on his mind all day, and he told Charlie Bartlett, “I suppose I’ll have to go back to Boston because that’s where my library is going to be.” Then his face darkened and he added, “But of course I’m not going to have a library if I only have one term. Nobody will give a damn.”
He returned to the White House as Hirsh was leaving. Knowing that Caroline was disappointed that he had missed her French class, he persuaded Hirsh to repeat it. As she held up pictures of objects, the children shouted their names in French. He felt sheepish that his command of the language was so poor that he had not known that a watermelon was la pasteque.
Hirsh took Caroline on an excursion every Monday afternoon and taught her a new French sentence. Jackie had promoted it as a way for her daughter to do something any ordinary child might do, such as shop at a store and travel by bus. Today Hirsh took Caroline and her ten-year-old son, Mike, to the National Zoo and taught her to say “We went to the zoo.” Caroline and Mike returned to the Oval Office with balloons for her father and brother. Mike had broken his tooth playing football and the dentist had given him a temporary silver cap. When Kennedy noticed it he exclaimed, “My God, Mikey, you look like a Russian with that tooth!” Realizing that he had hurt the boy’s feelings, he bent down, opened his mouth wide, and said, “Mike, you look into my mouth and you let me know which one of my teeth are capped. I had an accident too.”
Caroline repeated her new French phrase, and he asked if it was the name of a bird. She informed him that it meant “We went to the zoo.”
“Well, I think it’s time I learned French.” Turning to Hirsh, he asked, “If you gave me a French lesson how would you do it?”
She suggested he could start by reading the French edition of Profiles in Courage. He was already familiar with its contents, so they could concentrate on conversation and grammar. During each lesson he could summarize what he had read in French. He told her he wanted to be fluent by June, when he would be going to Normandy for the twentieth anniversary of D-Day. (He also wanted to surprise Jackie, whose facility with languages had left him somewhat jealous.)
He was serious enough to squeeze four lessons into the next ten days. He was a difficult student, self-conscious and restless, getting up and down, impatient to learn. “I can’t wait to surprise the world,” he told Hirsh. “It’s always good to improve [at] anything.” He ruminated a long time before producing a sentence that was grammatically correct but atrociously pronounced, and he interrupted so often that she warned that if he wanted to be fluent by June he would have to concentrate more. She praised his grammar and was honest about his accent. His goal, he said, was to sound like a French person and “to be able to do it [speak French] just perfectly.” She estimated that might take at least a year. “I bet I do it in six months,” he boasted.
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THE DECEMBER 1962 CEREMONY at Miami’s Orange Bowl honoring the Cuban exiles who had been captured during the Bay of Pigs operation and freed in exchange for a ransom of medicine and baby food had been emotional for Kennedy because he felt responsible for their captivity. After the brigade presented him with its flag he impulsively declared, “I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana,” but it soon became apparent that he and the exiles differed on what constituted a free Havana. For them, it was a city without Castro or communism, one liberated by a coup, counterrevolution, or invasion. As much as this scenario would have pleased him, he could imagine a resolution of the Cuban problem leaving Castro in power. Because he considered both outcomes acceptable, and prized success over ideology, since the spring of 1963 he had been following a two-track strategy of continuing clandestine attempts to destabilize and overthrow Castro while encouraging efforts to establish a dialogue.
These strategies converged on November 12, when he chaired a meeting of senior administration officials overseeing the CIA’s anti-Castro campaign. Director McCone presented a dispiriting summary of the current state of play, admitting that Cuba’s military remained loyal to Castro and its internal security forces well organized. Desmond Fitzgerald, who headed the CIA’s Cuban task force, gave a discouraging update on the Agency’s efforts to topple Castro. Casualties among CIA operatives in Cuba had increased, with twenty-five captured or killed, while the willingness of Canada, Spain, and the UK to continue trading with Cuba had diluted the impact of U.S. economic sanctions. He reported that the Agency continued to support autonomous anti-Castro groups mounting sabotage operations from bases outside U.S. territory, and listed four recent sabotage operations, but offered vague statements about their effect, justifying them as ways of “keeping up the pressure,” raising “the morale of the people,” and adding to Cuba’s “growing economic problems.”
Kennedy asked point-blank if the CIA’s sabotage program was worthwhile. Rusk criticized it as counterproductive, and argued that it might weaken support for the exile groups within Cuba and result in the Soviets increasing troop levels on the island and staging more incidents on the Berlin autobahn. Despite these objections, the consensus at the meeting was that the CIA program should continue because it was low-cost, denied Castro essential commodities, and improved the morale of the anti-Castro Cubans.
Kennedy signed off on several sabotage operations scheduled for the weekend, but hours later he was pursuing the second track of his Cuban policy. Bundy called Attwood to deliver a message from the president that was so sensitive he said he could only communicate it orally. He told him that Kennedy wanted him to contact Castro’s confidant, Dr. Rene Vallejo, and say that while it did not seem practical at this stage to send an American official to Cuba, the administration would like to begin the conversation by having Vallejo visit the United States and deliver any messages from Castro directly to Attwood. Bundy added, “In particular, we would be interested in knowing whether there was any prospect of important modification in those parts of Castro’s policy which are flatly unacceptable to us: namely . . . (1) submission to external Communist influence, and (2) a determined campaign of subversion directed at the rest of the hemisphere. Reversals of these policies may or may not be sufficient to produce a change in the policy of the United States, but they are certainly necessary, and without [them] . . . it is hard for us to see what could be accomplished by a visit to Cuba.” Kennedy was reiterating the conditions that he had asked Jean Daniel to communicate to Castro: cease the subversion and move out of Moscow’s orbit. Attwood told Bundy he would ask Lisa Howard to call Vallejo before getting on the line himself and directing the conversation according to these guidelines. If Vallejo agreed to travel to New York, Attwood would come to Washington to receive instructions on how to handle the negotiations.
• • •
KENNEDY CONVENED THE FIRST formal meeting of his reelection team in the Cabinet Room on Tuesday afternoon. Attending it were his brother Bobby; his brother-in-law Stephen Smith, who would be managing the campaign; his political advisers Lawrence O’Brien and Ken O’Donnell; Ted Sorensen; John Bailey, who chaired the Democratic National Committee (DNC); DNC treasurer Richard Maguire; and Richard Scammon, the director of the Census Bureau. Vice President Johnson had not been invited.
Lincoln had noticed Johnson’s name appearing less often on the lists of invitees to crucial policy and planning meetings in 1963. Her record of the private conferences between him and the president showed them meeting alone for more than ten hours in 1961, but for only seventy-five minutes in 1963. It is unlikely Kennedy simply forgot to invite him to the November 12 meeting, because he frequently complained about Johnson’s sensitivity and must have known he would be hurt to be excluded from the first major planning session for the 1964 campaign. Johnson had left for his Texas ranch two days earlier but would surely have stayed in Washington to attend an important meeting like this one. Sorensen believed he had been excluded because he was “not part of the inner circle and did not have the warmest relations with—or full confidence of—everyone in that room,” a polite way of saying that, as Sorensen well knew, Kennedy had little confidence in his ability to perform the only vice presidential duty that really mattered, assuming the presidency.
Their relationship had reached a nadir that fall after Johnson aligned himself with the hard-line Diem supporters in the administration and criticized the wheat deal. He sat silently at White House meetings, offering a few mumbled remarks or becoming infuriatingly loquacious. Kennedy may not have wanted him around because he was afraid that a man who considered himself more politically astute than anyone else in the White House would try to dominate the meeting, and perhaps because he was undecided about keeping him on the ticket. Even so, it was a curious omission, since the meeting concerned a reelection campaign in which Johnson’s home state would play a key role. Kennedy even raised the subject of his forthcoming visit to Texas at the meeting, saying in an irritated voice that he would be seeking campaign funds as well as votes, and adding, “Massachusetts has given us about two and a half million, and New York has been good to us, too, but when are we actually going to get some money out of those rich people in Texas?”
Few believed that Kennedy would lose the election. McGeorge Bundy was even thinking ahead to a possible third term, telling Jackie that there might be such a demand for him to return to the White House that they should investigate the legality of him serving another term if it were not consecutive with the first two. The respected political commentator Stewart Alsop wrote in his November 2 Saturday Evening Post column that although Washington journalists who wanted to hype the forthcoming contest were offering scenarios for a Goldwater victory, hardly anybody believed it. “Goldwater doesn’t have a prayer of beating John F. Kennedy in 1964,” he said. “Neither does anyone else.” He argued that Kennedy’s Catholicism, which had cost him so many votes in 1960, was no longer a factor, nor were his youth and inexperience now that he had become “a middle-aged fellow with thickening jowls, a tendency to lose his reading glasses, [and] the remembered fear of nuclear war written clearly on his face.”
A recent Gallup poll had Kennedy winning 58 percent of the national vote compared with Goldwater’s 39 percent, with 6 percent undecided or voting for third-party candidates. The greatest threat to his reelection was that Goldwater would implode before taking the nomination, leaving him to face a more moderate Republican opponent such as Governor George Romney of Michigan or Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York. Goldwater had already made some gaffes, promising to sell the popular Tennessee Valley Authority, and telling an interviewer, “You know I haven’t got a really first-class brain.”
Kennedy made it clear at the November 13 meeting that he intended to micromanage the Democratic convention, just as he had state visits and the design of Air Force One. He wanted a livelier convention, and said, “For once in my life I’d like to hear a good keynote speech.” He also wanted a color film about the last four Democratic presidents. Only NBC broadcast in color, most Americans did not own color sets, and a color film would be more expensive, but he thought it would impress the delegates. “We’ll run on peace and prosperity,” he declared. “If we don’t have peace we’d better damn well win the [cold] war.” He went on to assess his chances in each state, showing a detailed knowledge of the key players and demonstrating that he really could have driven down that street in Boston and recalled which stores had displayed his posters in 1946.
He sounded less sure-footed when he shifted to the big picture. As if thinking out loud, he said, “But what is it that we can make them decide they want to vote for us, Democrats and Kennedy—the Democrats not strong in appeal obviously as it was twenty years ago. The younger people . . . what is it we have to sell ’em? We hope we have to sell ’em prosperity, but for the average guy that prosperity is nil. He’s not unprosperous but he’s not very prosperous. . . . And the people who are really well off hate our guts. . . . There’s a lot of Negroes, [but] we’re the ones that are shoving the Negroes down his throat. . . . We’ve got peace, you know what I mean, we say the country’s prosperous and I’m trying to think of what else.”
He passed out copies of Homer Bigart’s article about poverty in Kentucky and said that as part of his prosperity theme he wanted to mount an attack on poverty. He would remind Americans that most poor people were white and would schedule photo opportunities with white coal miners in Appalachia and poor Negroes in Northern cities.
“I wouldn’t do that, Mr. President,” Scammon interjected. “You can’t get a single vote more by doing anything for poor people. Those who vote are already for you. I was thinking of photographs with policemen in the cities. Then you should go to the new shopping centers on the highways. The votes you need, your people, men with lunch pails, are moving out to the suburbs.”
Scammon’s analysis fascinated him, and he asked how these new demographics might play out in 1964. Scammon spoke of Catholics buying suburban houses and suddenly becoming concerned about their property taxes.
He immediately got it: preventing these new suburban Democrats from turning into Republicans would be key to winning a landslide in 1964. He asked Scammon how many Democrats retained their party affiliation after moving to the suburbs, and at what rung on the social and economic ladder a Democratic family became Republican.
“It might be less than ten thousand dollars a year. I’ll try to find out,” Scammon promised.
“It’s going to be a new kind of politics,” he said.
“It’s a new kind of country.”