President Kennedy: Profile of Power

TOUCHSTONE

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Copyright © 1993 by Reeves-O’Neill, Inc.

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including the right of reproduction

in whole or in part in any form.

First Touchstone Edition 1994

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Photo research by Natalie Goldstein

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7   9   10   8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reeves, Richard.

President Kennedy : profile of power /Richard Reeves.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917–1963. 2. United

States—Politics and government—1961–1963. 3. Presidents—United

States—Biography. I. Title.

E842.R358 1993

973.922′092—dc20

ISBN: 0-671-64879-9

ISBN: 0-671-89289-4 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-6718-9289-0 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-4391-2754-4 (eBook)

The excerpt from The Oracles on page 179 is taken from The

Collected Poems of A. E. Housman. Copyright 1922 by Henry Holt

and Company, Inc. Copyright 1950 by Barclays Bank Ltd.

Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Source Notes

Bibliographic Essay

Acknowledgments

Index

Photo Credits

This book is for Fiona O’Neill Reeves

And for her mother, Catherine O’Neill

And her grandmothers, Dorothy Forshay Reeves

and Bridget Ruddy Vesey

John F. Kennedy’s favorite book was Melbourne by David Cecil, the biography of William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, who was prime minister of Great Britain for seven years, from 1834 to 1841, serving as the political mentor of Queen Victoria. The book was published in 1939 and this is part of Cecil’s description of the young William Lamb:

"To be a thinker one must believe in the value of disinterested thought. William’s education had destroyed his belief in this, along with all other absolute beliefs, and in doing so removed the motive force necessary to set his creative energy working. The spark that should have kindled his fire was unlit, with the result that he never felt moved to make the effort needed to discipline his intellectual processes, to organize his sporadic reflections into a coherent system of thought. He had studied a great many subjects, but none thoroughly; his ideas were original, but they were fragmentary, scattered, unmatured. This lack of system meant further that he never overhauled his mind to set its contents in order in the light of a considered standard of value—so that the precious and the worthless jostled each other in its confused recesses; side by side with fresh and vivid thoughts lurked contradictions, commonplaces and relics of the conventional prejudices of his rank and station. Even his scepticism was not consistent; though he doubted the value of virtue, he never doubted the value of being a gentleman. Like so many aristocratic persons he was an amateur.

His amateurishness was increased by his hedonism. For it led him to pursue his thought only in so far as the process was pleasant. He shirked intellectual drudgery. Besides, the life he lived was all too full of distracting delights. If he felt bored reading and cogitating, there was always a party for him to go to where he could be perfectly happy without having to make an effort. Such temptations were particularly hard to resist for a man brought up in the easygoing, disorderly atmosphere of Melbourne House, where no one was ever forced to be methodical or conscientious and where there was always something entertaining going on. If virtue was hard to acquire there, pleasure came all too easily.

PRESIDENT KENNEDY

Introduction

The Emperor, Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book about the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, begins with the writer searching through Addis Ababa for the men who once were Selassie’s court. Each tells his story of life around the King of Kings, from the man who took down every spoken word, the Minister of the Pen, to the high and rich officials whose lives could be made or broken by a glance or the hint of a frown in public from the man at the center of the world they knew.

It was a marvelous portrayal of life at court, the circle around power. Reading it, though, I found myself wondering what this all looked like to Selassie. What was it like at the center? Knowing little of emperors or Ethiopia, I began to think about what it was like to be the President of the United States. Though I had written books on three Presidents and had talked and corresponded with a fourth over the years, I realized that most of what I knew, or thought I knew, was basically the testimony of the men and women of White House courts, the circles around the power of each of those Presidents.

Eventually those thoughts focused on John F. Kennedy, the 35th President. I thought there were enough witnesses and enough records to try to reconstruct his world from his perspective. I was interested in what he knew and when he knew it and what he actually did—sometimes day by day, sometimes hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute. The timing was right, it seemed to me. Kennedy came to power at the end of an old era or the beginning of a new, which was important because his words and actions were recorded in new ways. The pulse of communication speeded up in his time. At the beginning, his presidency was recorded by stenographers and typists; secretaries listened in and took notes during telephone calls. There were things we never see anymore: carbon paper, stencils, mimeographs, vacuum tubes and flashbulbs. Three years later, there were transistors, television sets in almost every home and tape recorders and Xerox machines in offices. Because of jet airliners, Americans suddenly lived only six hours from Europe.

The timing also seemed right to me because of the availability of new information and insight. The end of the Cold War resulted in new sources of documents and interviews, particularly in Moscow. A central reality of Kennedy’s presidency was being the first modern Commander-in-Chief who came to office facing the possibility that a potential enemy had the military power to destroy the United States; the size of the Atlantic and the Pacific could not stop nuclear missiles launched from the Soviet Union. The Freedom of Information Act has opened new windows to the extraordinary events of those years—in Moscow and Washington, in Berlin, Birmingham, and Havana. Although far too much information is still hidden by government classification procedures and the defensiveness of the Kennedy family, it is now possible to separate fact from imagery in relations between Kennedy and the other significant men of power in the early 1960s, including former President Eisenhower, Premier Khrushchev, Charles de Gaulle, Harold Macmillan, Fidel Castro, Ngo Dinh Diem, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the President’s own men, particularly Robert Kennedy and Robert McNamara.

Looking back, it seemed to me that the most important thing about Kennedy was not a great political decision, though he made some, but his own political ambition. He did not wait his turn. He directly challenged the institution he wanted to control, the political system. After him, no one else wanted to wait either, and few institutions were rigid enough or flexible enough to survive impatient ambition-driven challenges. He believed (and proved) that the only qualification for the most powerful job in the world was wanting it. His power did not come from the top down nor from the bottom up. It was an ax driven by his own ambition into the middle of the system, biting to the center he wanted for himself. When he was asked early in 1960 why he thought he should be President, he answered: "I look around me at the others in the race, and I say to myself, well, if they think they can do it why not me? ‘Why not me?’ That’s the answer. And I think it’s enough."

Kennedy’s public persona was generational. He was the first of the men who did the fighting during World War II to become Commander-in-Chief. When Lieutenant (junior grade) John Kennedy, U.S. Navy, came back a hero, he moved first into a position prepared for him by a rich father whose own ambitions had evolved into plans for his children. The son was elected commander of a new Veterans of Foreign Wars post, named for his brother, a pilot killed in action over Europe: the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Post of Boston. A year later he was a candidate for Congress with streetcar posters that read: The New Generation Offers a Leader. By the end of the 1950s, the young veterans, the junior officers and enlisted men, 16 million of them, were in their thirties and forties. And they were frustrated. They had been expected to come back from their conquering roles, accept the cheers, and then act their age. Wait their turn.

Of all of them, it was Jack Kennedy who moved most boldly. The great shared experience of his generation was a major factor in neutralizing the fact that he was only the second Roman Catholic to run for President, and the first, New York Governor Al Smith, had been crushed in 1928. But the war had changed and was still changing America, a country almost one-third Catholic by then. One Nation Indivisible was an idea the United States needed to win: We’re-all-in-this-together was made visual in patriotic World War II movies showing tough Irish and Italian kids from Brooklyn fighting alongside all-American towheads from Iowa. Last names were not such a big deal anymore to the young men coming home, and there could be no better answer to innuendo that Catholicism was somehow un-American than the one Kennedy used: No one asked me my religion in the South Pacific.

Kennedy decided to run for President after the 1956 Democratic National Convention. Adlai Stevenson, the party’s nominee, had thrown open the race for Vice President, and Kennedy, a thirty-nine-year-old second-term senator, could not resist going for it. He came close, finally losing the balloting to Senator Estes Kefauver. I know now that you don’t get far in public life until you become the total politician, he said after twenty-four thrilling hours of competing for delegate votes. That means you’ve got to deal, not just with voters, but with the party leaders, too. From now on I’m going to be the total politician.

Three weeks after the convention, Dr. Janet Travell, who had been treating his back problems with massive injections of novocaine for the past five years, asked him: You weren’t really disappointed when you lost the nomination, were you?

Yes, I was, he answered. But I learned that it should be as easy to get the nomination for President as it was for Vice President. Until then, I thought I would have to work first toward the vice presidency.

There was, he realized, no certain reward for such things as patience and loyal service, so he began the transformation to total politician by going to twenty-six states to campaign for the Stevenson-Kefauver ticket—and for himself. He courted the old pols and sought out young veterans of World War II, setting up a political network that responded to him above party. When Stevenson was defeated by President Eisenhower, Kennedy told an old friend, Charles Bartlett, the Washington correspondent of the Chattanooga Times: Now, this is the time for me.

You have plenty of time. Why not wait? said Bartlett.

No, they will forget me. Others will come along.

Kennedy stayed on the road, organizing friends from school and the war, using seed money from his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who was worth $200 million or so. Getting national press attention was an essential part of the strategy, and the way to do that was to win a few primaries. He was not as interested in trying to collect bunches of delegates controlled by state political leaders as he was in appearing to be the inevitable nominee, impressing newspaper and magazine reporters and editors that he was the choice of Democrats outside Washington.

Come out with me, he said in late 1959, to Bartlett. You’ll be surprised at the reaction I’m getting.

After only three 1960 primary victories, in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and West Virginia, over only one campaigning opponent, Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, Kennedy had the nomination won. He needed only a Southern running mate not totally offensive to the North, and the blessing of Adlai Stevenson. But Stevenson would not bend to him, still hoping for another run in 1960. A bitter old man with a little thing, Kennedy said of him in private, describing what his party’s most dignified leader looked like coming out of a shower. Stevenson returned the feeling, though his language was more polite: That young man! He never says ‘please’ and he never says, ‘I’m sorry.’

Actually Kennedy understood manners and all the rules of appropriate behavior. But he did not necessarily believe they applied to him. His entreaties to Stevenson for support were polite and respectful. Up to a point. A few days before the 1960 convention, he asked Stevenson again. No, I can’t do that, Stevenson answered once more. Kennedy said, Look, I have the votes for the nomination. If you don’t give me your support, I’ll have to shit all over you. I don’t want to do that but I can, and I will if I have to.

For his running mate, he chose the one man who could do the most for him in November, Lyndon Johnson of Texas, the Majority Leader of the Senate. Many of his supporters were shocked and his campaign manager, Robert Kennedy, was enraged. So the total politician sowed confusion, putting out inside stories that he had never really wanted Johnson, or that he had thought Johnson would not accept an offer, or that the invitation had been meant as nothing but courteous ritual—whatever version they wanted to believe.

His Republican opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, was only forty-seven years old himself, but he was an old man’s idea of a young man, eager to please his elders. Former Lieutenant (senior grade) Nixon’s Navy photo showed him standing stiff and unsmiling in full dress blues. Kennedy’s campaign photo showed him at the wheel of PT-109, the little patrol boat he commanded in the South Pacific. He was bare-chested and grinning, wearing a fatigue cap and sunglasses.

Something else worked for Kennedy, something new: the growing penetration of television into the life of the nation. It was a studio medium then, with bulky equipment and hot lights and heavy stage makeup. In a Chicago studio, Kennedy and Nixon debated on September 26, 1960. Whatever the words spoken that night, Kennedy seemed cooler, healthier, and wittier than Nixon. He looked as presidential as the man who had been Vice President for the past eight years.

There were only three themes in Kennedy’s general election campaign, as it was analyzed by Walter Lippmann, the most cerebral of the country’s syndicated columnists: The military power of the United States is falling behind that of the Soviet Union: we are on the wrong end of a missile gap. The American economy is stagnating: we are falling behind the Soviet Union and behind the leading industrial nations of Western Europe in our rate of growth. The United States is failing to modernize itself: the public services, education, health, rebuilding of the cities, transportation, and the like, are not keeping up with a rapidly growing urbanized population.

In hundreds of interviews with the men and women who were around John Kennedy, the story that I tend to remember first was told by Abram Chayes, a Harvard Law School professor who became counsel to the Department of State. He was waiting for the candidate at Washington National Airport one hot August afternoon in 1960, on board the Caroline, a twin-engined Convair that was the campaign plane. The two-year-old daughter for whom the plane was named was there along with a half dozen other small children, two pregnant women—Jacqueline Kennedy and Jean Kennedy Smith—and another professor, Walt Rostow, an economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kennedy arrived two hours late for the short flight to a weekend at Hyannis Port. The pilot cranked the propellers into action as soon as he saw Kennedy walk into the airport’s private North Terminal. Inside the plane, the passengers watched him at the pay telephones, making one more call, then another and another.

Finally, he came up the stairway to the plane, kissing his wife and sister then strapping them into the plane’s two beds, buckling the children into their seats with a flash of conversation for each, leaving lighted little faces in his busy wake. He did the same with the men, focusing on each for a moment. Then, surrounded by smiles and happy chatter, he settled in his seat, a large swivel chair in the center. The stewardess came back with a bowl of his favorite fish chowder, someone handed him the afternoon newspapers, and his barber began to cut his hair as the professors reported to him on their specialties and the issues of the day.

It was almost as if those around him were figures in tableaux, who came alive only when John Kennedy was in place at the center. He was an artist who painted with other people’s lives. He squeezed people like tubes of paint, gently or brutally, and the people around him—family, writers, drivers, ladies-in-waiting—were the indentured inhabitants serving his needs and desires.

On November 8, 1960, Kennedy received 34,226,731 votes to 34,108,157 for Nixon, winning an Electoral College majority of 303 to 219. Over the next three years, he often stuck a slip of paper into his pocket to remind himself of that tiny popular vote margin: 118,574 votes.

•   •   •

This book is a narrative of what President John F. Kennedy did at crucial points of his three years in power. What I searched for was what he knew or heard, said or read. In this account all of what he says, and is said to him, is taken from recordings, documents, journals, notes, and interviews. In the instances where someone’s thoughts are mentioned, it is because they told me what they had been thinking, or they told someone else at the time, or they recorded their thinking in journals or memoranda. In some cases, usually in tape-recorded meetings and telephone conversations, I have edited out uhs, repetitions, and confusing errors of grammar.

The two essential Kennedy books, A Thousand Days by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Kennedy by Theodore Sorensen, were written within two years of the President’s assassination. Both of those eyewitness books see his presidency as a tale of personal growth, with Kennedy making early mistakes, learning from them to gain a sure control of the power of his position, and then to go on to later triumphs. The Kennedy I found certainly did not know what he was doing at the beginning, and in some ways never changed at all, particularly in a certain love for chaos, the kind that kept other men off-balance.

The man at the center was a gifted professional politician reacting to events he often neither foresaw nor understood, handling some well, others badly, but always ready with plausible explanations. He was intelligent, detached, curious, candid if not always honest, and he was careless and dangerously disorganized. He was also very impatient, addicted to excitement, living his life as if it were a race against boredom. He was a man of soaring charm who believed that one-on-one he would always prevail—a notion that betrayed him when he first confronted the premier of the Soviet Union.

Kennedy was decisive, though he never made a decision until he had to, and then invariably he chose the most moderate of available options. His most consistent mistake in governing, as opposed to politics, was thinking that power could be hoarded for use at the right moment—but moments and conditions defied reason. He had little ideology beyond anti-Communism and faith in active, pragmatic government. And he had less emotion. What he had was an attitude, a way of taking on the world, substituting intelligence for ideas or idealism, questions for answers. What convictions he did have, on nuclear proliferation or civil rights or the use of military power, he was often willing to suspend, particularly if that avoided confrontation with Congress or the risk of being called soft. If some would call that cynicism, he would see it as irony. Life is unfair, he said, in the way the French said, C’est la vie. Irony was as close as he came to a view of life: things are never what they seem.

•   •   •

No one ever knew John Kennedy, not all of him, said Charlie Bartlett.

That was obviously the way Kennedy wanted it. All his relationships were bilateral. He was a compartmentalized man with much to hide, comfortable with secrets and lies. He needed them because that was part of the stimulation: things were rarely what they seemed. He called people when he wanted them, for what he wanted then. His children came at the clap of his hands and were swooped up and taken away at a nod to a nanny. After his election, he said his White House organization would look like a wheel with many spokes and himself at what he called the vital center.

It was instinctive at first, he said. I had different identities, and this was a useful way of expressing each without compromising the others.

There was an astonishing density of event during the Kennedy years. In October of 1962, the President was still grappling with the riots that began with the admission of the first Negro to the University of Mississippi when he was shown the aerial photographs that proved the Soviets were putting nuclear missiles into Cuba. In one forty-eight-hour period in June 1963, he gave the speech of his life trying to break the world’s nuclear siege, America was changed by a church bombing in Alabama, and the world was changed by a monk burning himself to death on a street in Saigon. On an August day when more than two hundred thousand Americans were marching for civil rights in Washington, Kennedy was giving the orders that led to the assassination of an annoying ally, the president of South Vietnam.

•   •   •

John F. Kennedy was one of only forty-two men who truly knew what it is like to be President. He was not prepared for it, but I doubt that anyone ever was or will be. The job is sui generis. The presidency is an act of faith.

On the morning after the new President’s first night in the White House, Charlie Bartlett asked him if he had slept in Abraham Lincoln’s bed, and Kennedy answered that he had: I jumped in and just hung on! He was still hanging on three years later.

Chapter 1

JANUARY 19, 1961

In the weeks between his election and inauguration as the thirty-fifth President of the United States, John F. Kennedy spent as much time as he could relaxing in the sun at his father’s house in Palm Beach, Florida. On the first Saturday night of December, at a casual dinner in the big kitchen with a few friends and members of his campaign staff, someone asked him whether he was nervous about his first meeting with President Dwight Eisenhower, the next Tuesday. Kennedy jumped up laughing. Good morning, Mr. K-e-e-nnedy, he said, imitating Eisenhower, who sometimes mispronounced his name. Then he swept an imaginary hat from his head, bowed, and said: Good morning, Mr. Eeeee-senhower.

Three days later, the forty-three-year-old President-elect, the youngest ever elected, was driven to the North Portico entrance of the White House to meet the seventy-one-year-old President, the oldest man ever elected. Kennedy opened the door of his limousine before it had even stopped and bounded up the six stairs alone, carrying his hat. He caught Eisenhower by surprise. The President, attended by a covey of aides, whipped off his own hat and started to reach out his hand, but Kennedy beat him to the handshake, too. Good morning, Mr. President, he said.

"Senator, Eisenhower replied. The Marine Band struck up The Stars and Stripes Forever."

•   •   •

It was the first formal encounter between two men of surpassing charm from different generations. The cameras clicking furiously were focused on the two most famous smiles in the land. The general who had commanded all of the Allied troops in Europe during World War II was born in the nineteenth century. At Kennedy’s age, he was a major in the Army. His famous grin and calm public manner had convinced many of his countrymen that he was a nice guy and a lousy politician. Those who knew him well thought the opposite. Kennedy lived along a line where charm became power. Men and women fell in love with him. And politics, the career he had chosen, was a business that magnified charm and institutionalized seduction.

Kennedy and Eisenhower had a certain contempt for each other. Kennedy’s campaign attacks had been muted and indirect because of Ike’s popularity, but Eisenhower still took them personally. Privately, Kennedy called Ike that old asshole, the wisecracking Navy officer mocking the commander. Eisenhower, using words of his generation, had called Kennedy that young whippersnapper or Little Boy Blue.

The two men had met for the first time fifteen years earlier in Potsdam, Germany, at the end of World War II, but General Eisenhower did not remember being approached by an ex-lieutenant, junior grade, who was working as a special correspondent for the Hearst newspapers. And Senator Kennedy’s status in Washington before the 1960 election might be measured by the fact that he had never met with the President in eight years in the Senate.

Their meeting on December 6 was officially unofficial. No notes were taken and no aides sat in. The senator looked at the President’s bare desk as they sat down and asked him where he put his papers. Halfway through the question, he realized there were no papers. Eisenhower did not work that way. He did not like details and he preferred talking to reading.

They talked for more than an hour, mostly about national security and foreign affairs. Eisenhower realized quickly what was on Kennedy’s mind and he didn’t much like it. His questions were about the structure of decision making on national security and defense. It was clear to Ike that Kennedy thought his structure was too bureaucratic and slow—with too many debates and decisions outside the President’s reach and control. Eisenhower thought Kennedy was naive, but he was not about to say that, and so he began a long explanation of how and why he had built up what amounted to a military staff apparatus to collect and feed information methodically to the Commander-in-Chief and then coordinate and implement his decisions.

No easy matters will ever come to you as President. If they are easy, they will be settled at a lower level, Eisenhower told him. It was not an idea that appealed to Kennedy. He wanted to see it all.

I did urge him to avoid any reorganization until he himself could become well acquainted with the problem, Eisenhower dictated to his secretary later. But clearly Kennedy was not interested in organization charts, or in organization itself, for that matter. Ike’s bent toward order was exactly the kind of passive thinking he wanted to sweep away. He had no use for process, with its notemaking, minute taking, little boxes on charts showing the Planning Board and the Operations Coordinating Board. He did not think of himself as being on top of a chart; rather, he wanted to be in the center, the center of all the action.

The other matter the President wanted to discuss was burden-sharing. Alone and in a shorter session with Cabinet members that followed, Eisenhower told his successor that it was time to start bringing the troops home from Europe. America is carrying far more than her share of free world defense, he said. It was time for the other nations of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) to take on more of the costs of their own defense. Their economies were more productive than ever in their histories and the costs of American deployment were creating a trade imbalance, draining gold from the United States Treasury. Americans, in uniform and out, were spending and buying more overseas than foreigners were spending here. Kennedy nodded. Eisenhower sounded just like his father, who had always drummed into him that nations are only as strong as their currencies.

At the end of the day, the two men had impressed each other in a grudging sort of way without really agreeing on much. Kennedy was surprised to find Eisenhower so knowledgeable, but that confirmed his conviction that Eisenhower’s problem was that he had not understood the real powers of the office. Ike, too, found Kennedy surprisingly well informed about many things, but being President was not one of them.

Kennedy told his brother Robert, who had waited in the limousine, that he knew now how Ike had become President; there was a surprising force to the man. Eisenhower wrote almost the same words about Kennedy in his diary that night, though he worried that he did not begin to understand the complexity of the job. It seemed to him that Kennedy thought the presidency was about getting the right people in a few jobs here and there.

He got it. Kennedy believed that problem solving meant getting the right man into the right place at the right time. If things went wrong, you put in someone else. His man for the transition from candidate to President was his personal lawyer, Clark Clifford, who had served on President Truman’s staff. In August, three months before the election, Kennedy had said to him, "I don’t want to wake up on November 9 and have to ask myself ‘What in the world do I do now?’"

But he did wake up as President-elect asking that question, surrounded by transition memos—literally surrounded, because he liked to work in bed—from Clifford, from college professors, from national security intellectuals and high-minded social reformers, from management consultants. Most of it was a waste of time: lists of three hundred appointments that could be delayed until after the inauguration were not worth much to a politician whose first priority was to begin a new campaign to win over some of the 34 million people who voted against him.

•   •   •

Kennedy had celebrated victory in his house at Hyannis Port with a joke about his wife and Toni Bradlee, the wife of a friend, Ben Bradlee, the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek magazine. Both women were pregnant. "Okay, girls, you can take out the pillows now. We won! But he looked tired and subdued when he met with four hundred reporters in a National Guard Armory near Hyannis Port. The New Frontier" the candidate had proclaimed during the campaign was approached rather timidly that morning. He announced that his first telephone calls as President-elect had been to the crustiest dons of Washington’s old frontiers: J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, and Allen Dulles, director of the CIA. He had asked them both to stay on.

Then he had to lie. When a reporter asked about rumors that he had Addison’s disease, an adrenal gland failure often considered terminal, Kennedy replied without hesitation, I never had Addison’s disease. In regard to my health, it was fully explained in a press statement in the middle of July, and my health is excellent. The campaign statement was not true. Kennedy had received the last rites of the Catholic Church at least four times as an adult. He was something of a medical marvel, kept alive by complicated daily combinations of pills and injections.

The necessity to project an image of tirelessness during the campaign was a tremendous physical strain on Kennedy—and a personal triumph. But he was a wreck when it was over. Sometimes he was barely coherent in the month after the election. He spent most of November and December at the Palm Beach house his father had bought for $100,000 in 1933. There, and later at his house on N Street in Georgetown, he began to put together a government, beginning with Clifford’s simple memos, which read like high school texts and were basically lists from McKinsey and Company, the management consultants who had done an almost identical transition study for Eisenhower in 1952. "The occupants of 71 to 74 positions in the Executive Branch and agencies will vitally influence the President-elect’s power to govern, one began. The most important posts are State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, and the UN."

Kennedy interviewed strangers for hours every day—falling asleep during an interview with a candidate for Secretary of Agriculture—trying to decide whether to give them some of the most powerful jobs in the world. We can learn our jobs together, he told one, Robert McNamara, who was president of the Ford Motor Company, when McNamara told him he didn’t know anything about government. I don’t know how to be president, either.

He had read about McNamara, who was a Republican, in Time magazine on December 2 and met him six days later. McNamara asked the first question: "Did you really write Profiles in Courage yourself?" Kennedy insisted he did and then offered McNamara his choice of two of the most important Cabinet seats, Treasury or Defense. McNamara came back a week later saying he preferred Defense, then handed Kennedy a letter detailing his conditions, which included the right of final approval of all appointments in his department.

Kennedy glanced at the paper, then handed it to Robert Kennedy, sitting beside him on the loveseat. Looks okay, his brother said.

It’s a deal, said John Kennedy. He repeated what he had said at their other meeting: We’ll learn together.

"Jesus Christ, this one wants that, that one wants this, he grumbled as he shuffled notes on the way to play golf in Palm Beach. Goddamn it, you can’t satisfy any of these people. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it all."

His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who was sitting in the front seat, turned around and said: Jack, if you don’t want the job, you don’t have to take it. They’re still counting votes up in Cook County.

By the second week in December, with newspapers needling him about the slow pace of announcements, Kennedy’s Georgetown living room looked like a doctor’s office, with men shuttling in and out every twenty minutes or so, while reporters and cameras waited outside in the cold.

He met his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, who was the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, for the first time on the same day he met McNamara. One of Rusk’s qualifications was that he was not Adlai Stevenson. Aren’t you going to choose Stevenson? Rusk had asked him when Kennedy called. No, Kennedy replied. Adlai might forget who’s the President and who’s the Secretary of State.

He also passed over David K. E. Bruce, a former Ambassador to France and West Germany, because he thought that at sixty-two he was too old. The man he really wanted was Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It would be nice to have someone in the Cabinet I actually knew, he told Robert Kennedy when Fulbright’s name was on the table, or the love-seat. But his brother thought the senator from Arkansas would be unacceptable to black African leaders (and perhaps to American Negroes) because he had signed the Southern Manifesto, an anti-civil rights declaration, in 1957.

When he came down to Washington for his interview, Rusk didn’t know that by process of elimination the big job was almost his already. He was surprised when Kennedy called him the next day with the offer.

Wait a minute . . . , Rusk said. He began telling Kennedy the amount of his mortgage payments and that he had only a few thousand dollars in the bank, saying he could not afford to take a cut from his $60,000 Rockefeller Foundation salary to the $25,000 paid Cabinet members. Kennedy was taken aback. All right, he replied. I’m going to Palm Beach tomorrow. You come down. There were a couple of calls to Rockefeller brothers, beginning with Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, and by the time Rusk arrived in Florida, the Rockefeller Foundation had provided a financial package to supplement Rusk’s government salary. When Rusk got to the Kennedy mansion, the Washington Post, lying at Kennedy’s feet, had a headline saying he would be Secretary of State. It had been leaked by Kennedy himself to Philip Graham, the paper’s publisher.

As Rusk sat there, Kennedy picked up a telephone and called Stevenson to ask him to be Ambassador to the United Nations. Rusk listened, dazzled, as Kennedy worked on Stevenson—flattering, stroking, prodding. As Kennedy described the job, Rusk thought there would be nothing left for him and the President to do. Finally, Stevenson said yes, he would serve under Rusk.

Kennedy chose Walter Heller of the University of Minnesota as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers mostly because he was not from Harvard or Yale. There were too many Ivy Leaguers around him already. Heller had met Kennedy in October before he spoke to a Minneapolis rally. The candidate was running an hour late and was changing his shirt when Senator Hubert Humphrey brought Heller in.

You’re an economist? Kennedy asked. Tell me, do you really think we can make this 5 percent growth rate in the platform?

It’ll be pretty tough, said Heller, meaning it would take massive government stimulus. Kennedy asked three more questions: Is accelerated depreciation an effective way to increase investment? Why has the German economy grown so fast in the face of high interest rates? Can a tax cut be an effective stimulus? Heller had never seen anything like it. As soon as Kennedy began talking, the other dozen men in the room stopped, falling away, but still straining to hear what he was saying to the outsider.

The next time Heller saw Kennedy was in December, in the Georgetown living room. Kennedy nodded toward the dining room where C. Douglas Dillon, Eisenhower’s Undersecretary of State, was on the telephone. I’ve asked him to be Secretary of the Treasury, Kennedy told Heller. Dillon was calling to get Ike’s permission to join the enemy. Eisenhower tried to discourage him, telling him he was being used by liberals who would inevitably undermine sound money principles.

I think Dillon will accept and I need you as a counterweight, the President-elect told Heller. He has conservative leanings, and I know your leanings are liberal. Kennedy had that 5 percent growth he had promised on his mind, his promise to Get the country moving again! Heller’s mission was to figure out how to make it happen. Dillon’s mission would be to make sure Heller did not go too far and take Kennedy with him.

As he was leaving, Heller asked: What about a tax cut? Kennedy said he was not against it, but that he could not do it just after calling on Americans to sacrifice.

What he told Dillon a moment later was that he needed the confidence of the financial community, and Dillon as former chairman of Dillon, Read Company was a member of the highest standing. I’ll put up Walter Heller because I have to for political reasons, Kennedy told him. But I will do nothing without your recommendation. I will always refer to you as my chief financial adviser.

How can you do this? asked Kennedy’s next visitor, Democratic Senator Albert Gore, Sr., of Tennessee. Not only was Dillon a Republican, he had given $30,000 to Richard Nixon’s campaign. If you want someone rich from Wall Street, pick Averell Harriman.

Too old, said Kennedy.

Besides, he was trying to put together a bipartisan government, with Republicans as his shields on defense and economics. Sound was the image he wanted to project.

Don’t worry about this, he told Gore. Kennedy said he was going to appoint a liberal Harvard professor, Stanley Surrey, to be the assistant secretary in charge of tax policy.

That’s not going to work, said Gore, who had sat next to Kennedy in the Senate. You’re going to be busy with a million things. Don’t you know that? Dillon will make the policy. Nobody’s going to listen to some assistant secretary.

Albert, Kennedy said, I got less than 50 percent of the vote. The first requirement of the Treasury job is acceptability to the financial community.

Finally, he chose Minnesota Governor Orville Freeman for Secretary of Agriculture after a thirty-second, one-question interview in the downstairs bathroom of the Georgetown house. The question was: Would he accept an undersecretary from the South? Freeman said, Yes. Kennedy said, All right, let’s go out, and they walked out to the street for the announcement.

Working down a list of the most important sub-Cabinet jobs with Dean Rusk by his side, Kennedy called Paul Nitze, one of the brightest but least personable of the Wall Street lawyers who had become the intellectual scouts of the Cold War.

"Paul, I have a friend of yours sitting next to me, and he has agreed to become my Secretary of State. He would like you to be his Undersecretary for Economic Affairs. ... I would like you to become either my National Security Adviser or Deputy Secretary of Defense."

How long do I have to make up my mind? Nitze asked.

Thirty seconds.

I choose Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Fine, thank you, Paul.

But McNamara held Kennedy to their deal, and vetoed Nitze. Then McNamara called Nitze again and asked whether he would step down a level, to an Assistant Secretary of Defense. Stung, Nitze called the private Palm Beach number Kennedy had given him. A woman answered and came back in a minute to say: Mr. Kennedy doesn’t wish to speak with you.

The next day, Kennedy let The New York Times know on background—meaning the paper could use the information but not his name—that Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., would be appointed Secretary of the Navy. The leak was intended for an audience of one. But McNamara, who was the one-man audience, was too new at the game to get the message. He wondered how the Times had got it so wrong. He did not know FDR, Jr. He had no intention of naming him to anything.

Bob? The call came a few days later. "Jack Kennedy. I was wondering if you saw that story in the Times about Frank Roosevelt? Have you talked to him?"

No.

Do you know how I won the West Virginia primary? What he did for me there? Kennedy had thought he might lose in West Virginia, and probably be knocked out of the race, until Franklin Roosevelt’s son had come down to campaign for him. It was as if the son of God had come to give the Protestants permission to vote for this Catholic.

I understand, McNamara said. But I hear he’s a drunk and a womanizer.

Maybe, Kennedy said, you could just talk to him.

McNamara telephoned Roosevelt in New York and flew up for lunch. He was barely back in his Washington hotel room when the telephone rang. How did it go? asked Kennedy.

Good. Fine, McNamara said. But I can’t appoint him.

Why not?

He’s a drunk and a womanizer.

Kennedy sighed. I guess I’ll have to take care of him some other way, he said.

On December 15, Kennedy told Robert Kennedy to come to Georgetown for breakfast. They had discussed a Cabinet job, perhaps Attorney General, or maybe a place in the sub-Cabinet, in the Defense Department with McNamara, but Robert had decided to go back to Massachusetts, perhaps to run for governor. No, John Kennedy said at breakfast. "You will be Attorney General.

I need you ... I believe McNamara will make a great contribution, but I don’t know him, he went on. Dean Rusk ... the truth of the matter is I’ve had no contact with him. I need someone I know to talk to in this government. It was true, though John Kennedy hadn’t wanted his brother in the Cabinet until his father had insisted: I want Bobby there. It’s the only thing I’m asking for and I want it.

So, that’s it, General, he said, standing up. Let’s go. They went out onto the N Street stoop.

"Nine strangers and a brother for a Cabinet," said Fred Dutton, one of Kennedy’s talent scouts.

•   •   •

On January 19, 1961, the eve of the inauguration, Kennedy and Eisenhower met for a second time. They were alone for forty-five minutes, and Ike talked about being President. He began with the black vinyl satchel, the Football, which contained nuclear options, commands, and codes, officially called Presidential Emergency Action Documents. It was carried by military officers who handed it off to each other in eight-hour shifts, like quarterbacks and halfbacks. The President carried a laminated plastic card in his wallet to identify himself to electronic systems and begin choosing among deadly options outlined in the thirty thick looseleaf pages in the Football. In a couple of minutes, he could activate the command links to junior officers in the squadrons of bombers always in the air and on alert, to the missile silos under the Great Plains and in European fields, to the submarines under the Atlantic and Pacific. Then, those lieutenants could turn the keys and push the buttons to blow up the world, or the part of the world marked in red on National Security Council maps: the Soviet Union and China and their Communist allies.

Watch this, Eisenhower said, picking up a telephone and ordering: Opal Drill Three! They were standing by the French doors behind the President’s desk. Three minutes later a Marine helicopter settled on the lawn behind the Oval Office. Kennedy loved it.

I’ve shown my friend here how to get out in a hurry, the President said as they walked into the Cabinet Room for an official working session with the old and new secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury. Eisenhower and Kennedy sat side by side at the head of the table. Secretary of State Christian Herter sat next to Rusk on one side, and Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates was next to McNamara on the other. Next to them, Secretary of the Treasury Robert Anderson sat with Dillon. On the other side, Eisenhower’s transition chief, General Wilton Persons, sat with Clark Clifford.

The agenda was as formal as the arrangement of the chairs. Kennedy had requested discussion in four categories: (1.) Trouble Spots—Berlin, Far East (Communist China and Formosa), Cuba; (2.) The National Security Set-up—including how the Pentagon is working; (3.) Organization of the White House; (4.) President’s Confidential Comments regarding Macmillan, De Gaulle, Adenauer.

Eisenhower’s talking paper on Cuba had been written by Robert Hurwitch, the State Department’s Cuba desk officer, who had also prepared Kennedy’s paper. Following instructions from his once and future bosses, Hurwitch handed a one-page memo to Eisenhower and a two-page version to Kennedy.

As Eisenhower began to speak, Kennedy interrupted. He was looking over at Persons, who was writing furiously. Mr. President, he said, I did not understand that notes were to be taken at this meeting.

Eisenhower cocked his head toward Persons, who remarked, Everything a President says is recorded. This is historical record.

Kennedy glanced at Clifford, who pulled a pencil from his pocket and began taking notes on the back of his copy of the meeting agenda, continuing on the back of press statements prepared before the session began.

Thailand is a valuable ally, Clifford wrote as Eisenhower began, "because Communist-dominated Laos would expose T’s borders. Military training under French is poor. Would be a good idea to get U.S. military instructors in there. [Thailand] . . . Morale not good in Democratic forces, Ike says Communist forces always appear to have better morale—Commie philosophy inspires them to be dedicated. If a political settlement cannot be arranged then we must intervene. (Herter)."

If Laos should fall to the Communists, Eisenhower said, glancing at his papers, "then it would be a question of time until South Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma would collapse. The United States would accept this task with our allies, if we could persuade them, and alone if we could not, our unilateral intervention would be our last desperate hope.

This is one of the problems I’m leaving you that I’m not happy about, he said, looking directly at Kennedy. We may have to fight.

How long would it take to put a division into Laos? Kennedy asked.

Eisenhower looked to Gates. Twelve to seventeen days, answered the Defense Secretary. That was from the United States, but there were U.S. troops that could be moved in more quickly from bases in Japan and Okinawa or the Philippines.

This is the cork in the bottle of the Far East, Eisenhower said; if Laos is lost to the free world, in the long run we will lose all of Southeast Asia. . . . You are going to have to put troops in Laos. With other nations if possible—but alone if necessary.

If the situation was so critical, Kennedy asked, why didn’t you decide to do something?

I would have, but I did not feel I could commit troops with a new administration coming to power.

Kennedy asked the President whether he would prefer a coalition government including Communists in Laos or military intervention by SEATO (the South-East Asia Treaty Organization), which had been put together by the United States as a Pacific mutual defense alliance in the manner of NATO. Eisenhower and Herter double-teamed him. Eisenhower said coalitions never worked; the Communists always ended up in control. Herter added that SEATO would not work either. Thailand, the Philippines, and Pakistan might be willing to join with U.S. troops in Laos, but the British and the French, who were also SEATO members, had already made it clear that they would quit that alliance before sending troops to Asia.

What do you recommend as the next step to be taken? Kennedy asked.

The most desirable solution, Herter said, would be a coalition government without Communists, but he did not think that was possible. "The government’s armed forces—our side—has [sic] been unwilling to fight, despite our logistical support. . . . The Thais, the Philippines, the Pakistanis, who are counting on SEATO for their own self-defense against Communist aggression, are concerned that SEATO is a paper tiger ... I can’t see any alternative for us but to honor our obligation."

Eisenhower then said he was sure the Thais, the Filipinos, and the Pakistanis would join in the fight. But he doubted anyone else would.

What about China? Kennedy asked. The President said he thought the Chinese would be cautious about the possibility of provoking a major war. Kennedy had the uncomfortable impression that Ike was enjoying this.

It’s a high-stakes poker game, Eisenhower said. There’s no easy solution.

McNamara asked only one question. He wanted an appraisal of the United States’ limited war requirements versus limited war capabilities.

Eisenhower and Gates handed him a National Security Council study that had been completed two weeks earlier. It listed five places the United States might be drawn into war at some level: Laos, Korea, Formosa, Iran, and Berlin.

We can handle one limited war, a Korean war situation, Gates said. But not two. And any number of small wars. Small wars are no problem.

Eisenhower looked dubious. He said he did not like the phrase limited war. In other words, he said, when do you go after the head of the snake instead of the tail?

In answer to a list of questions from Rusk about trouble spots, Herter began with Berlin. He said more and more refugees were fleeing from East Germany to West Berlin every day, and sooner or later the Communists had to do something to stop that.

When Herter went back to Laos, Eisenhower interrupted to offer his opinion about the country next door, South Vietnam. There was no similar danger there, but there was always a possibility of a coup overthrowing the country’s anti-Communist leader, Ngo Dinh Diem.

Should we support guerrilla operations in Cuba? Kennedy asked.

To the utmost, said Eisenhower.

The President-elect had been briefed twice by the CIA on the training of anti-Castro guerrillas in Guatemala. He had the impression that the operations would involve infiltration of small sabotage teams. Eisenhower said there were no final plans.

We cannot let the present government there go on, Eisenhower said. Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson offered his own perspective: Large amounts of United States capital now planned for investment in Latin America are waiting to see whether or not we can cope with the Cuban situation.

Kennedy asked about atomic weapons in other countries.

Israel and India, Herter replied. The Israelis had a nuclear reactor capable of producing ninety kilograms of weapons-quality plutonium by 1963. He advised Kennedy to demand inspection and control before there were atomic bombs in the Middle East. In India, he said, the Russians were helping build a reactor.

The meeting ended before noon, twenty-four hours before John Kennedy would take the oath as President. As they got up, eight of the ten men in the room moved away from the two at the center. The outgoing President picked that moment to tell his successor quietly that whatever was said during the campaign about Soviet missile and nuclear strength (he obviously meant Kennedy’s missile gap charges), the United States had a strategic edge because of nuclear-firing submarines along the coasts of the Soviet Union: You have an invulnerable asset in Polaris. It is invulnerable.

John Kennedy was considered a pretty cool fellow, the most detached and rational of politicians. But he was amazed at Eisenhower’s calmness as he talked of nuclear submarines, war, and disaster. Equanimity was the word Kennedy used later, talking to Robert Kennedy about the meeting. He thought there was something frightening about Eisenhower. There was also something politically intimidating about succeeding a man of such great popularity. The new President was determined never to cross his predecessor. Ike’s approval was not necessary, but his public disapproval would be devastating.

Eisenhower knew that, of course, and now he reminded Kennedy. I’m going to try to support you every way I can on foreign policy, he said. But there is one point on which I would oppose you strongly—the seating of Communist China in the U.N. and bilateral recognition.

That took care of that. Kennedy thought it was stupid not to have diplomatic relations with the Communist government in China. But relations with Eisenhower were a more compelling concern.

It was snowing as Kennedy left the White House, a visitor for the last time.

Chapter 2

JANUARY 20, 1961

"Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country," said John F. Kennedy. Then he paused, took another bite of bacon, and reached for his coffee.

This was the second morning rehearsal of his Inaugural Address. The first time had been in the bathtub, with his words echoing off the tiles. Then it was on to the bacon and eggs. January 20, 1961, was quite a day for this American Catholic—three strips of bacon on a Friday morning. Because of the inauguration of the first Catholic President of the United States, the pope had given Roman Catholics in the Washington area a special dispensation from the Church’s stricture against eating meat on Fridays.

An hour later, Kennedy stepped out into the eight inches of snow that had fallen overnight to go to mass at Holy Trinity Church near Georgetown University. His way was cleared by soldiers who had been shoveling snow all night into seven hundred Army trucks. Kennedy had been up pretty late himself, coming home at 4:00 A.M. after moving from celebration to celebration, his limousine guided through the streets by running Secret Service men waving flashlights. Bundled-up people were grouped around fires on the great Mall from the White House to the Lincoln Memorial. Turn the lights on in here, he said on the way to one party early in the evening, so they can see Jackie. She had gone home before he went on to The Gala, a variety show put on by Frank Sinatra at the city’s Armory. The stars of the show, Ethel Merman, Jimmy Durante, Gene Kelly, and others, had trouble making it there from their hotels and it had lasted until almost 3:00 A.M., when Kennedy went on to Paul Young’s restaurant for a late dinner hosted by his father.

Have you ever seen so many attractive people in one room? Kennedy had said as he walked into the restaurant with his friend, Paul Fay, Jr., an ensign on Lieutenant Kennedy’s boat, PT-109, twenty years before. His assignment for this night and the next day and night was to escort a twenty-eight-year-old actress named Angie Dickinson, with whom Kennedy slipped away to private rooms a couple of times during the ceremonies.

After mass that Friday morning, Kennedy picked up his wife and together they went to the White House at eleven o’clock to meet President and Mrs. Eisenhower for coffee. Kennedy and Eisenhower rode together up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Their relationship was slightly awkward, and Kennedy chatted a little nervously about The Longest Day, a book on D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944. Eisenhower said he knew about the book but hadn’t read any of it. Kennedy was surprised. But of course Ike had been there, commanding the operation.

There were twenty thousand people on the East Plaza of the Capitol. It had not been easy for most of them to get there, even with the Army working through the night. The temperature was ten degrees below freezing, exceptionally cold for Washington. The sky was a bright and clear blue, and the sun reflected everywhere off the new snow.

The day’s Washington Star caught the generational mood in its humor column, Potomac Fever: Ike leaves office as popular as ever. People like the way he keeps the White House free of the taint of government. . . . President Kennedy swears to uphold the Constitution. From now on, no Kennedy will serve more than two terms, waiting his turn until his older brother is through.

•   •   •

There were indeed sixteen Kennedys among the one hundred and five men and women on the platform. Most of them were there by title, beginning with President Eisenhower, former President Truman, Vice President Nixon, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, who would administer the oath of office. The only outsiders were Marian Anderson, who would sing The Star-Spangled Banner, and Robert Frost, the eighty-six-year-old New England poet, who had trouble reading in the white glare of the day, so he set aside the new poem he had composed for the