WASHINGTON
During their weekly White House breakfast meeting with Kennedy, the Democratic congressional leaders expressed reservations about his decision to visit Dallas, given what had happened to Stevenson. When House Majority Whip Hale Boggs cautioned that he was going into “quite a hornet’s nest,” he replied, “Well, that always creates interesting crowds.” His mind was wandering, and he drew doodles of sailboats, writing above them “20th anniversary,” and “August,” perhaps references to August 1963, the twentieth anniversary of the sinking of PT 109, or to August 1964, the twentieth anniversary of his brother’s death.
He would be away for most of the next twelve days, first in Texas, then in Hyannis Port for Thanksgiving. He spent some of Wednesday attending to personal business. He complained to Dr. Burkley about a case of jock itch, signed a lease to rent Brambletyde next July, asked Lincoln to check on the forecast for Texas so Jackie would pack the right clothes, and told Turnure to make sure that Jackie had a hairstyle that could withstand the wind while she was riding in an open limousine. Turnure suggested a shorter motorcade, or putting the bubble top over the car. “Take a forty-five-minute drive around Washington with Dave Powers,” he said. “See what you look like when you come back.”
He read a carbon copy of Jim Bishop’s A Day in the Life of President Kennedy as soon as it arrived. Bishop never revised, so this was his first and only draft, written in less than three weeks and padded with dull descriptions of the White House furniture and biographies of Kennedy’s staff and cabinet. Among his revelations were that the president liked a grilled cheese sandwich and consommé for lunch, kept the pool heated to ninety degrees and did the breaststroke so he could swim and talk (Bishop had not wondered why he had turned the customarily solitary activity of swimming into a group event), and treated time “as though he has been told he has a week to live.”
Kennedy approved the manuscript without asking for a single revision. Jackie was more sensitive, or read it more closely, and requested sixty minor changes. Bishop agreed to all but one, refusing to cut Dave Powers’s remark that his family called him the president’s “other wife.” Bishop included some observations in his memoirs that had escaped inclusion in A Day in the Life. “A bit of old-fashioned Boston peeked through his habits,” he wrote. “He sat on the same cushion of the same settee every night. He lit a big cigar and poured a cold beer. Then . . . [he] would ask Mrs. Kennedy to play the same music: a recording of Camelot. He was in a pleasant rut: same cigar, same beer, same music, same cushion.”
Kennedy’s last meeting was a late-afternoon conference with Roger Hilsman and Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson, prompted by a communication from Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk requesting that the United States cut off aid to his nation. They showed him a draft of a proposed reply that he considered too harsh. He added some words of friendship and reconciliation, leading Johnson to reflect, “He was always seeking to conciliate; he was always seeking to understand other people and what their motives were. He could never quite accept the fact that other people would not always return his good will.”
Before greeting the seven hundred guests attending the annual White House Judicial Reception, he hosted a reception upstairs for the Supreme Court justices and their wives. He remained seated, rocking in his chair, a hand under his chin as he scrutinized the justices. Sixty-five-year-old Associate Justice William O. Douglas had just married twenty-three-year-old law student Joan Carol Martin, and this was her first visit to the White House. Like de Kooning, who had been surprised to find Kennedy “incandescent, golden, and bigger than life,” Joan Douglas noticed that “he was not black and white, as he had seemed to be in pictures,” but was “vibrant and glowing. . . . [and] an outdoorsman, like my husband.” De Kooning had been captivated by the notion of this “gallant, intelligent, handsome man leading the country and the world.” Joan Douglas thought he had taken “all the formaldehyde out of [the] government,” becoming “a noble figure moving through the pages of history.”
He and Jackie descended a red-carpeted stairway to the reception. There was no receiving line, so his cabinet, members of the federal judiciary, and Justice Department employees surrounded them as they moved between rooms while the Marine band played tunes from My Fair Lady and Camelot. Treasury Secretary Dillon tracked him down in the East Room to say good-bye before leaving for the Far East with Rusk and Salinger. “You’re going off to Japan,” Kennedy said. “I’ve got to go to Texas. I wish we could trade places.” Dillon thought he was “in wonderful form” and “looked great.” The Supreme Court justices also remarked on his high spirits to Chief Justice Earl Warren. But Ethel Kennedy thought he seemed withdrawn and preoccupied. Either she had detected something the others had missed, or he was in high spirits and worried about Vietnam, Bobby Baker, and the feuding Texas Democrats, and she and the Supreme Court justices were noticing the same “extraordinary variety of expressions” that had mesmerized de Kooning.
Bobby Kennedy spent almost forty-five minutes at the reception talking to Jackie about Texas and asking if she was certain she had recovered sufficiently from Patrick’s death to endure the strain of campaigning. November 20 was his thirty-eighth birthday, and Ethel threw a party for him at Hickory Hill after the Judicial Reception. Bobby told one of his guests that he had misgivings about Texas, saying flatly, “I don’t want him to go.” He asked O’Donnell if he had seen the letter from Byron Skelton urging the president to skip Dallas. O’Donnell said he had decided not to show it to him since if he suggested removing an important city like that from the itinerary because Skelton was nervous, he would have thought he had lost his mind.
Sometime that evening Jean Daniel delivered Kennedy’s message to Fidel Castro. After making Daniel repeat Kennedy’s criticism of the Batista regime three times, Castro said, “I believe Kennedy is sincere. I also believe that today the expression of this sincerity could have political significance.” After condemning the Bay of Pigs and the U.S. blockade, he continued, “But I feel he inherited a difficult situation. . . . I also think he is a realist: he is now registering that it is impossible to simply wave a wand and cause us, and the explosive situation throughout Latin America, to disappear.” Showing that he understood the thrust of Kennedy’s message, he said, “All the same, at a time when the United States is selling wheat to the Russians, Canada is trading with China . . . why should it be impossible to make the Americans understand that socialism leads, not to hostility toward them, but to coexistence? Why am I not Tito or Sekou Toure?”
Kennedy skipped his brother’s party because he wanted Jackie to be rested for Texas. They dined alone at the White House, and she read him a letter from her mother urging her to “have a wonderful time in Texas!” In return, he showed her a tongue-in-cheek letter he had received from her sister. Lee had written that whenever Jackie went on trips she always received beautiful presents, mentioning that while Onassis had given Jackie an expensive gift after the cruise, she had received only “3 dinky bracelets that Caroline wouldn’t wear to her own birthday party.”
He asked Jackie what she was packing. Referring to the November 22 luncheon at the Dallas Trade Mart, he said, “There are going to be all these rich Republican women at that lunch, wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets, and you’ve got to look as marvelous as any of them. Be simple—show these Texans what good taste really is.” She held up some dresses and outfits, and they chose a pink suit with a navy-blue collar and a matching pink pillbox hat for Dallas.
After dinner he received a call from George Ball, who had just returned from Paris and wanted to brief him on U.S. and Common Market relations. He told Ball that he planned to return from Texas on Saturday evening so he could have lunch the next day with Ambassador Lodge, and suggested that he come to Wexford on Sunday evening. They could prepare for his meeting with Chancellor Erhard of West Germany the next Monday, and it would give him an opportunity to show Ball around his new house.