CAPE COD AND WASHINGTON
Monday was the nineteenth anniversary of the day that Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., had been killed in action while participating in Operation Aphrodite, a harebrained and ultimately unsuccessful scheme that involved Navy pilots flying B-17 bombers packed with explosives toward German missile sites and U-boat pens on the French coast before bailing out at the last minute into the English Channel. On Monday morning all of the Kennedy siblings except Rosemary, who had been institutionalized in 1944 after a botched lobotomy, and Jack attended a requiem Mass for Joe at St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis Port. The White House announced that the president was missing the service because he was visiting Jackie, but it took only twelve minutes to fly by helicopter from Otis to Hyannis Port, so he could have easily done both, and he later found time to take an excursion on the family speedboat.
He did not skip Joe’s Mass because he had been any less devastated by his older brother’s death than his siblings. Joe had been more athletic and popular in school, and sometimes teased and bullied him, but they had been competitors, not enemies, and he had mourned him deeply, telling Lem Billings that Joe’s death had left him “shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win.” The headmaster of Choate, the boarding school both had attended, wrote his mother that he would now have to live Joe’s life as well as his own. He ended up living Joe’s life instead of his own, having the brilliant political career that his father had always imagined for Joe.
It was difficult for a Kennedy to be in Hyannis Port and not be reminded of Joe or his sister Kathleen, who had died in a 1948 plane crash. Ted Kennedy called his family’s rambling clapboard house “an oasis of stability and family love,” and it was the only real home the Kennedy children had known while shuttling between their parents’ winter residences in Palm Beach and suburban New York. JFK had lived in dormitories at two boarding schools and three colleges, then in houses and apartments in Washington, but every summer he returned to Hyannis Port. It had been the backdrop for the iconic 1953 photograph on the cover of Life showing him and Jackie on a sailboat, barefoot, tanned, and flashing radiant smiles, and the 1962 photograph on the cover of Look in which he was driving a golf cart packed with his nieces and nephews, hair flying and mouths open, screaming in delight. It was where he had devised his strategy for the 1960 election and learned that he had won it when Caroline jumped on his bed and said, “Good morning, Mr. President”; and where he and Bobby had acquired houses adjoining their parents’ home, so they could play flashlight tag and touch football on the same lawn, swim off the same beach, and sail in the same waters as they had in their youth, glimpsing the ghosts of their younger selves, and those of Kathleen and Joe.
Hyannis Port was also where the family had donated an altar to St. Francis Xavier Church commemorating Joe. To the left of the crucifix a painted image of St. George represented England, from which Joe had taken off on his final mission; to its right was St. Joan of Arc, representing France, his destination. Above them floated the badge of a naval aviator, a pair of wings against a blue background. It was impossible for a Kennedy to attend Mass here and not be reminded of Joe’s suicidal mission, one for which he had volunteered, hoping to match his younger brother’s PT 109 heroics. Kennedy never mentioned Joe by name in his speeches, perhaps because he feared he might break down, so it is possible that he skipped the Mass on the nineteenth anniversary of Joe’s death because he was afraid he would look at this altar and begin weeping, and after Patrick’s death he could not bear any more tears.
• • •
HE ARRIVED AT THE WHITE HOUSE at 4:00 p.m. on Monday and immediately resumed what he had been doing before his hurried departure on August 7, trying to find sixty-seven senators willing to ratify his test ban treaty.
An hour before Jackie went into labor, he had been chairing a meeting in the Cabinet Room, called to organize the Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban. Attending were senior aides; cabinet members; James Wadsworth, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Norman Cousins, whose conversations with Khrushchev had led to the treaty. Kennedy had been pessimistic about its ratification, complaining that most senators had yet to announce their support, and mail to Congress and the White House had been overwhelmingly negative. Persuading two thirds of the senators to support anything would be difficult enough, he said; persuading them to ratify a treaty this controversial would be a miracle. Fifteen would vote against anything he supported, and if the vote were held that day he thought the treaty would fail, a catastrophe he compared to America’s failure to ratify the League of Nations following World War I.
Cousins provided a list of forty-eight prominent individuals who had agreed to serve on a pro-treaty Citizens Committee. Wadsworth warned that retired military officers and Dr. Edwin Teller, the developer of the hydrogen bomb and a lifelong conservative who was an implacable foe of limiting nuclear testing, would argue that fallout was not dangerous and the Soviets were likely to violate the treaty. Kennedy admitted that he was unsure he could even hold his own administration in line, and assumed some in the military and on the Atomic Energy Commission would work behind the scenes to persuade Congress and the press that the treaty threatened national security. The generals opposing it, he said, believed the best solution to a crisis was “to start dropping the big bombs.”
While flying to Otis after this meeting he had scribbled “Fullbright” [sic] and “Senate Preparedness Subcommittee” on a slip of paper. Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, a Democrat, chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, which would hold open hearings on the treaty beginning August 12. The Senate Preparedness Subcommittee was dominated by cold war hawks like Barry Goldwater, Henry Jackson, and Strom Thurmond, and chaired by Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, a treaty opponent who was insisting on closed hearings. After checking into the Ritz that evening, he had written “Joint Chiefs” on another scrap of paper. He believed the treaty could be ratified only if the Joint Chiefs of Staff supported it, and if enough Senate Republicans voted for it to compensate for the defection of Southern Democrats. He had lobbied the chiefs individually at the end of July, and they had agreed to support it in their testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in exchange for his endorsement of what became known as the “four safeguards”: a robust program of underground testing, the maintenance of modern nuclear laboratories and programs, the capability to resume atmospheric testing promptly if the Soviets withdrew from the treaty or cheated, and an improved capacity to detect violations.
Senator Stennis had summoned the chiefs to closed hearings, and Kennedy feared that if they testified there first, they might voice reservations about the treaty that would be leaked to the press before they could support it openly before Fulbright’s committee. To prevent this happening, he telephoned Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield when he returned to the White House on Monday to stress the importance of having the chiefs testify before his committee first. He was making “such a big thing” about it, he said, “because, in my opinion, the chiefs are the key and what they will say in public would be more pro-treaty than what they will say under interrogation by Scoop Jackson.”
He addressed the second threat to the treaty’s ratification, the opposition of Senate Republicans, during an hour-long off-the-record meeting with Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen that began at six that evening. His appointment book does not indicate where they met, but since the weather was fine and the matter under discussion so sensitive that Dirksen had insisted on going into the Rose Garden when they first spoke about it during the winter of 1961, they probably went outside, where there was less risk of having their conversation overheard or intercepted by whatever bugs the CIA, FBI, or other government agencies might have installed in the White House without Kennedy’s knowledge, a possibility he did not consider all that far-fetched. Secretary of State Dean Rusk had made a point of telling J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, in front of Kennedy, that if he discovered a hidden microphone or phone taps in his office he would resign and expose him. Bobby Kennedy often looked up at a chandelier in his office and shouted, “You bugging, Hoover? Well, listen to this, you old son of a bitch. . . .” And having bugged the Oval Office himself and kept it a secret from almost everyone in his family and staff, Kennedy had to entertain the possibility that someone might be doing the same thing to him.
In the summer of 1962, he had ordered the Secret Service agent Robert Bouck to install microphones in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, and his upstairs study. Bouck had hidden two microphones in the wall sconces of the Cabinet Room. In the Oval Office, he had placed one underneath the coffee table and another in Kennedy’s desk. Wires connected them to tape recorders in a locked basement room. Unlike President Nixon’s taping system, which ran continuously and recorded everything, Kennedy’s was engineered so he could record only the conversations that he wanted to preserve. In the Cabinet Room, he could press a button disguised as a buzzer to activate the system; in the Oval Office, he pressed one on the coffee table or another concealed in the kneehole of his desk. At first, only Bouck, his assistant Chester Miller, and Lincoln knew about the microphones. Bobby Kennedy and Ken O’Donnell learned about the system later, and Dave Powers figured it out after Kennedy cautioned him to watch his language, saying, “I don’t want to hear your bad words coming back at me.” None of his other senior advisers and members of his cabinet—not even his press secretary, Pierre Salinger; his aides Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Ted Sorensen; Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; or Secretary of State Dean Rusk—knew that he was recording them. His principal motive for taping selected conversations and meetings was probably to provide accurate and irrefutable material for his presidential memoirs. He had been disturbed that soon after the Bay of Pigs fiasco some of his advisers who had endorsed the operation began claiming that they had actually opposed it. His recordings would prevent a recurrence of this type of revisionism.
Secret Service agents swept through the Oval Office several times a week, looking for bugs in his telephones and unscrewing their mouthpieces to search for transistors that could pick up conversations before the scramblers made them unintelligible. Because assassins had attempted to poison foreign political figures with radioactive material hidden in their watches and rings, they swept the room with a Geiger counter and passed a wand over Kennedy’s wristwatch. But even these precautions had not persuaded him that his office was safe. Minutes before civil rights leaders gathered in the Oval Office on June 22, 1963, he had taken Martin Luther King, Jr., into the Rose Garden and prefaced his remarks by saying, “I assume you know you’re under very close surveillance.” King concluded that he was referring to the FBI, and wondered if he was insisting on speaking outdoors because he feared its surveillance might extend into the White House, and that the Oval Office might be bugged. As they walked, he warned King that the government had evidence that two of his close associates were Communist agents, said their presence in his inner circle might imperil passage of the civil rights bill, and urged him to break off contact with them. By warning him of this surveillance he was in effect thwarting an FBI operation and obstructing justice, reason enough to be sure he was not overheard.
Dirksen had seemed concerned about listening devices when he arrived in the winter of 1961 for a hurriedly arranged meeting. “I would like for you to surrender your title for a few minutes and join me for a stroll in the Rose Garden to discuss a very personal and private matter,” he had said. “It simply must be two friends—Jack and Ev—talking on a personal basis.”
Once they were outside, Dirksen told him that President Eisenhower wanted Kennedy to persuade his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy to cancel an impending indictment of the former New Hampshire governor Sherman Adams for tax fraud. Adams was a close friend of Eisenhower and had served as his chief of staff before resigning following allegations that he had received an expensive Oriental rug and fur coat from Bernard Goldfine, a Boston businessman under investigation for violating federal trade regulations. Goldfine had now supplied federal agents with documentary evidence indicating that he had also given Adams more than $150,000 in cash during a five-year period. The Justice Department had presented the case to a grand jury and was preparing to indict Adams for failing to pay taxes on the bribes. Adams’s wife had told Mamie Eisenhower that she was afraid he would commit suicide if he was indicted, and Eisenhower had told Dirksen, “I was president for eight years, and I think I have the respect of the American people and I want to retain it. I believe the day will come when President Kennedy will need the public assistance of a former president whose name has prestige and who’s beyond partisan arrows. I’d like you to ask President Kennedy, as a personal favor to me, to put the Adams indictment in the deep freeze. You have the authority to advise him he’ll have a blank check in my bank if he will grant me this favor.”
Dirksen sweetened Ike’s offer by also promising a blank check on his bank. It was a tempting deal. Eisenhower remained popular, and his support for a bill could influence public opinion and Republican congressmen. (During a 1962 interview with the television networks’ White House correspondents, Kennedy had said that Eisenhower had “great influence today in the Republican party, and therefore in the country.”) Dirksen’s check was even more valuable. Although Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, Southern Democrats opposed much of Kennedy’s domestic agenda, making it difficult for him to pass legislation without Republican support.
Kennedy told Dirksen that he was unaware of any case against Adams. They returned to the Oval Office and he called Bobby, who confirmed that an indictment was imminent. “Cancel it, and do it now,” he said. “Don’t sign the indictment. Place it in the deep freeze.” Bobby argued that showing favoritism to a tax cheat could “destroy us politically.” As Dirksen listened, their conversation became increasingly heated until he reminded Bobby who was president and said that if he could not comply “your resignation will be accepted.”
He did not mention Eisenhower’s “blank check” to Bobby, and anyone overhearing (or taping) their conversation would have concluded that he was extending a professional courtesy to a former president, sparing him the embarrassment of having a close associate indicted. Viewed that way, it was not unlike President Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon. But it was one thing to pardon Nixon to end the Watergate nightmare; it would have been another had Nixon or his agents offered Ford something in return. Similarly, once Kennedy cashed Eisenhower’s and Dirksen’s blank checks he would be transforming an act of presidential discretion and mercy into an unethical bargain, one in which he had obstructed justice to reap a future reward.
Dirksen wrote Eisenhower a carefully worded letter afterward. Referring to “one of your former staff members,” he said, “I believe everything is in proper order.” Eisenhower’s reply was equally opaque: “I am particularly indebted to you for following through the matter mentioned in your second paragraph.”
Many politicians would have viewed cashing Eisenhower’s blank check as business as usual. For Kennedy, it was a departure from the ethical standards that had guided him throughout his career. He had expounded on the importance of public integrity in his January 1961 farewell speech to Massachusetts legislators, telling them history would not judge them “merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation,” nor would their “competence and loyalty and stature . . . suffice at times such as these.” Instead, “the high court of history” would measure them by the answers to four questions: were they “men of courage,” “men of judgment,” “men of dedication,” and “men of integrity.” A man of integrity, he added, would permit neither “financial gain nor political ambition” to divert him from fulfilling the public’s “sacred trust.”
Kennedy was in many respects a hard-nosed politician, fond of saying, “Forgive your enemies but never forget their names,” and able to drive down a street in his former congressional district and recall which stores had displayed his campaign posters fifteen years earlier. The journalist Fletcher Knebel (who was married to Laura Bergquist) considered him “a very real, a very earthy, a very . . . cynical politician,” and noticed that whenever he mentioned someone who had crossed him, “his voice would get sharp, rough, his eyes would narrow and you could tell that the big time grudge was still on,” and at moments like these, Knebel said, his blond eyebrows gave him “the eyes of a snake.”
Although he demanded loyalty and held grudges against those who withheld it, he often failed to reward it with favors and patronage, an omission leading one Boston politician to complain, “Kennedy doesn’t pay for anybody’s funeral and seldom goes to wakes and he never seems to get anyone a job. Now what kind of a politician is that?” He was so averse to the patronage politics of his maternal grandfather, John (“Honey Fitz”) Fitzgerald, the baby-kissing, saloon-visiting, favor-swapping former mayor of Boston, that he slighted his own family. While he was serving in the U.S. Senate, his maternal uncle Thomas Fitzgerald had continued working as a uniformed toll taker on the Mystic River Bridge, and an unemployed cousin was so certain that Kennedy would refuse to help him get a government job that he approached Governor Foster Furcolo. He had resisted his father’s demand that he make Bobby attorney general, giving his personal attorney, Clark Clifford, the bizarre assignment of persuading his own father that it was a bad idea. His other major appointments had been remarkable for their lack of political calculation. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were all Republicans, and he had not met McNamara and Rusk before asking them to join his cabinet. The greatest challenge to his “Ministry of Talent” philosophy came when his father pushed him to appoint Francis Morrissey to a vacant seat on the federal district court in Massachusetts. Morrissey was unqualified for the position, and after much agonizing Kennedy left the seat vacant rather than give it to him.
His distaste for patronage was part of a moral architecture buttressed by Profiles in Courage, since after celebrating the bravery and ethics of eight exemplary U.S. senators he could hardly hold himself to a lower standard. Before winning the presidency, he had written in a notebook that if a politician wanted to be “a positive force for public good,” he needed to possess “a solid moral code covering his public actions.” The phrase “public actions” implied that a politician’s moral code as it pertained to his private actions was irrelevant—a distinction not lost on Jackie, who once told a guest at a Georgetown dinner party who had praised her husband for being a fine politician, “He may be a fine politician, but do we know if he’s a fine person?”
Until now he had allowed Eisenhower’s and Dirksen’s checks to remain blank. Either he was reluctant to transform his favor to Ike into a quid pro quo or he was waiting for an issue important enough to warrant filling them in. He did not cash them when Republican senators, led by Dirksen, defeated or delayed many of his major domestic initiatives. Nor did he cash them after Dirksen criticized his policies for increasing deficit spending and the size of the federal bureaucracy and called his New Frontier “nothing more than a bright ribbon wrapped around the oldest and most discredited political package on earth—the centralization of power,” a centralization that was “the essence of socialism.”
He and Dirksen were political adversaries but personal friends. They were an unlikely pair. Dirksen’s flamboyant mannerisms, ornate vocabulary, and mellifluous voice had led to nicknames such as “Wizard of Ooze” and “Liberace of the Senate,” while Kennedy refused to throw his arms into the air and his speeches were templates of restraint. Dirksen had crossed the aisle to support his foreign policy initiatives, incurring the wrath of other Republicans. Kennedy repaid him by offering tepid support to his Democratic opponent in the 1962 midterm election. This had not prevented Dirksen from raising objections to the test ban treaty and civil rights bill. Like the treaty, which required sixty-seven votes for ratification, the civil rights bill needed sixty-seven senators willing to vote for cloture and end a filibuster. In both instances, Kennedy needed the support of liberal and moderate Republicans, who looked to Dirksen for leadership.
Dirksen, who by the standards of the time could be considered a moderate Republican, was prepared to support all of the provisions of Kennedy’s civil rights bill except its most symbolic and important one, the article outlawing discrimination in public facilities and accommodations. Without it, the bill was no longer a historic measure—the twentieth century’s Emancipation Proclamation.
While the test ban treaty was being negotiated in Moscow, Dirksen had issued a statement warning that it might amount to the “virtual surrender” of the United States to the Soviet Union. After it was initialed, he had recommended “extreme caution and a little bit of suspicion,” and refused an invitation to travel to Moscow with the U.S. delegation to witness its signing. Eisenhower had also been critical. Before boarding the Queen Elizabeth for a nostalgic return to England and Normandy he had told reporters that the Soviet Union’s decision to resume atmospheric testing in 1961, breaking an informal moratorium that had lasted since 1958, was reason enough to view the treaty with suspicion.
Although many in the administration and Congress believed the treaty would be ratified, Kennedy remained pessimistic. Several influential Democratic senators were threatening to propose reservations to its text that would make it unacceptable to the Soviet Union. J. Edgar Hoover was secretly lobbying against it, Edward Teller was condemning it as a Soviet victory, and the dean of Notre Dame Law School had declared that any treaty with “militant activated atheism” was inherently evil. Bobby Baker, the secretary to the Democratic majority leader and a legendary Capitol Hill fixer and prognosticator about whom the Washington Post had said “His nose counts were regarded by press gallery admirers as close to infallible,” told Kennedy that his count showed a majority of senators voting for it, but not necessarily two thirds. When Baker said the treaty might be a lost cause, Kennedy replied, “Maybe not.”
Kennedy faced two decisions on August 12: whether to fill in his blank checks with Ike and Dirksen, and if he did, whether to ask them to support the civil rights bill or test ban treaty. History might judge him harshly for calling in his markers from the Sherman Adams deal, but it might judge his first term a failure if neither measure passed Congress. He had concluded his inaugural address by saying, “With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love.” But what if a favorable judgment from history conflicted with the sure reward of a good conscience?
By August 12, it would have been impossible for him not to recognize that he had thwarted justice in the Adams case in the expectation of reaping a future reward. The month before, he had refused to intervene in a far less serious case of tax fraud in which the potential defendant had been James Landis, a former dean of Harvard Law School and a close friend of the Kennedy family for more than thirty years. Due to a combination of negligence and psychological problems, Landis had failed to file returns between 1956 and 1960. He submitted delinquent returns in 1961 and 1962, paying back taxes and fines. Had he not been so close to the Kennedys, the IRS might have closed the case, but to avoid any appearance of favoritism it referred him to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. Bobby Kennedy recused himself, leaving the decision to Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.
During a telephone call on July 25, Kennedy told Katzenbach that he had consulted his attorney Clark Clifford, who had concluded that Landis would have to be indicted. “I guess we have to proceed,” he said, his reluctance evident in his voice. “Is that your judgment?”
“More damage not to go ahead,” Katzenbach replied.
“Five years [of not filing returns] is so serious that if anyone ever gets the idea that the President’s friends can get away with it, Christ, I think it would be an awful moral cracker to the Internal revenue, to taxpayers. The next time anybody got arrested, they’d say, ‘What the hell about Landis?’”
Landis pled guilty on August 2, and it could not have escaped Kennedy’s notice that he had helped Eisenhower’s friend Sherman Adams escape jail but had not saved his own friend from indictment for a less venal offense.
While walking in the Rose Garden with Dirksen on Monday, he finally filled in his blank checks. Faced with choosing between his ethics and history, he chose history; with choosing between a historic bill that began redressing centuries of wrongs and a treaty reducing the threat of a nuclear war, he chose the treaty.
He had told Sorensen that he would “gladly forfeit his reelection, if necessary for the sake of the test ban treaty,” and his ambassador to France, Charles (“Chip”) Bohlen, believed that he was “emotionally more wrapped up in the test ban than almost any other effort.” Glenn Seaborg, who headed the Atomic Energy Commission and met with him often that summer, thought he felt more passionately about it than any other measure sponsored by his administration, and called his determination to halt atmospheric testing and the spread of nuclear weapons “like a religion” to him. The treaty was neither perfect nor comprehensive, but it was a start. On July 31, he had told Seaborg and other senior government scientists that he believed the treaty would give the United States as much as eighteen months “to explore the possibility of détente with the Soviet Union—which may not come to anything but which quite possibly could come to something.” Because the United States and Soviet Union were unable to agree on protocols for policing a ban on underground testing, its official title was “The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,” but it was still more important to him than the civil rights bill. His decision proved that he had meant it when he said, “Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.”
He told Dirksen, “Ike said I had coin in his bank, and you say I have coin in yours. Ev, I must write a check on you and Ike.”
Dirksen agreed that they “owed him one.”
“Ev, I want you to reverse yourself and come out for the treaty. I also want Ike’s public endorsement of the treaty before the Senate votes. We’ll call it square on that other matter.”
“Mr. President, you’re a hell of a horse trader,” Dirksen said. “But I’ll honor my commitment, and I’m sure that General Eisenhower will.”
Both men kept their word. For Dirksen it was probably just another deal. But it left such a sour taste in Eisenhower’s mouth that during his first conversation with President Johnson on November 23 he complained, somewhat boorishly under the circumstances, about the “tactics” of the IRS and Kennedy’s Justice Department.
After Dirksen left, Kennedy swam in the White House pool and went upstairs to the family quarters. Sometime that evening, before or after drinking four Bloody Marys, he called an attractive Hungarian émigrée whom he had met at a dinner party. He had included her in White House events, but she knew about his womanizing and had resisted his attempts to seduce her. When he persuaded her to come to the White House in June, on the pretext of helping him pronounce some German phrases he wanted to use in Berlin, they had met alone in the family quarters and he had behaved impeccably, saying as she left, “See, I’ve been good.” Perhaps he simply wanted companionship again. He sounded depressed when he called, and after she refused his invitation to the White House they had a lengthy conversation during which he asked why God would let a child die.
That evening (or possibly the next day) he sat on the second-floor White House balcony with Mimi Beardsley, a young intern who had become his lover the year before. He picked up one condolence letter after another from a stack on the floor and read them out loud as tears rolled down his cheeks. He did not have sexual relations with Beardsley then, or ever again following Patrick’s death, although she continued seeing him and accompanying him on trips. She believed, she wrote later, that Patrick’s death had “filled him not only with grief but with an aggrieved sense of responsibility to his wife and family,” and that afterward, he began “obeying some private code that trumped his reckless desire for sex—at least with me.”