Authors: Jeff Greenfield
When the Secret Service said the cigars needed to be tested for possible contamination, Kennedy refused.
“No,” he said, “only
our
intelligence people would be stupid enough to try something like that.”
As for the central players in the cold war, the Harriman-Dobrynin talks in Geneva had yielded a framework for negotiations on strategic arms limitations . . . although the President himself was dubious about the real significance of such agreements.
“I think the idea that we’re closer to peace if we each have five hundred missiles instead of a thousand is an illusion,” he said in an off-the-record conversation with half a dozen columnists. “We don’t distrust each other because we’re armed; we’re armed because we distrust each other. But I suppose, as a symbol, it has its uses, and it’ll make the folksingers happy. You know that song by Joan Baez that says ‘The paper they were signing said they’d never fight again’? They actually
did
sign a piece of paper back in 1928. It was called the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Didn’t quite work, did it?”
In fact, the symbolism was more powerful than Kennedy had imagined. When U.S. and Soviet diplomats met to draft the specifics of a treaty, the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
“Doomsday Clock,” which had been set at seven minutes to midnight in 1960, and twelve minutes to midnight after the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, was moved back to twenty minutes to midnight. The thaw between the two powers led to more openness on the cultural front. CBS broadcast a two-hour special from the Bolshoi Ballet, while Soviet TV carried a two-hour pop and jazz festival from Lincoln Center’s
newly opened New York State Theater, although one band had to be cut because Soviet officials made it clear that they would not broadcast the “degenerate music” of the Beach Boys. (“Apparently,” Kennedy said at a press conference, “KGB agents discovered that if you play ‘Little Deuce Coupe’ backwards, it says ‘Marx was wrong.’”)
No piece of symbolism was more powerful and controversial than the issue of
Life
magazine that hit the newsstands on September 17, 1965, with its striking cover headline: INSIDE RED CHINA TODAY. To the surprise of its readers—and the smoldering resentment of its competitors—
Life
carried a 25,000-word report from Theodore H. White, accompanied by photographs from the magazine’s most celebrated photographer, Alfred Eisenstaedt. (Time-Life owner Henry Luce had signed off on the project, insisting only that a flattering profile of Chiang Kai-shek be included in the issue.) White was unsparing in his portrayal of a ruthlessly authoritarian regime, and also wrote of “a potential schism within the Communist leadership that could propel a cadre of fanatics into positions of authority—fanatics who seem determined to launch a new revolution, to wipe out every trace of traditional culture.”
By contrast, his portrait of Premier Chou En-lai, whom White had met decades ago during his years in China, was benign—as were some of Chou’s words.
“Ten years ago,” Chou said, “your secretary of state, Mr. Dulles, refused to shake my hand at the Geneva summit. It was the clearest signal imaginable that your government was determined to impose the puppet Chiang regime on the people who had thrown him out—as you yourself, Mr. White, witnessed and reported. Your political leaders call us an ‘outlaw nation.’ So how is it that we have normal, civil diplomatic relations with virtually all of your allies—
Britain, Canada, France? We trade with each of these nations . . . none of which have anything in common, nor any admiration, for our social system (as we have little admiration for yours). So, perhaps it is time for you Americans to ask yourselves two questions: First, which of us is the truly ‘isolated’ one? Second, if you are so proud, so confident of your way of life, what is it about us that you fear?”
When asked about the
Life
spread at his next press conference, Kennedy at first said only: “I read it with interest.” Then, in an answer that seemed clearly crafted in advance, he added:
“If we were to have diplomatic relations only with those countries whose principles we approved of, we would have relations with very few countries in a very short time. We recognize and trade with the Soviet Union; does anyone seriously argue that this means we endorse communism? We recognize and trade with Spain and Portugal. Does that mean we endorse dictatorships? I’ve said many times that we have neither the ability nor the intention to impose our will on any nation; our test is whether a nation abides by the norms of international diplomacy and respects the integrity of its fellow members of the world community.” He ignored the shouted follow-up question: “Do you believe Red China meets those standards?”
DID JFK HINT AT RED CHINA RECOGNITION? the
Washington Post
headline asked the next morning. For some of the President’s political foes, the answer was clear.
“An ill-conceived, naive, dangerous notion,” Richard Nixon said in a last-minute addition to his speech at the Chicago Commonwealth Club. “Mao and Chou lead a totalitarian regime that has openly welcomed the idea of a nuclear war that would kill billions as long as it ended in a Communist conquest. They have called the
United States ‘a paper tiger,’ and the President’s remarks will only confirm their belief.” Connecticut senator Tom Dodd, a prominent Democratic hawk, took to the Senate floor to denounce “this latest demonstration of a profound weakness of will.” At the White House, 600 members of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom marched with picket signs and an oversize white flag, chanting: “Hey! Hey! JFK! How many Reds did you hug today?”
And
Time
reported that “from Tokyo to Manila to Jakarta, from Singapore to Bangkok to Melbourne, a sense of unease has fallen across the Asian continent: Was Uncle Sam preparing to abandon its commitment to its free world allies, to usher in Red China as the ruler of a new Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere?
“‘It took war to free us from the Japanese tyrant,’ remarked a frowning cabdriver in Kuala Lumpur. ‘Does Mr. Kennedy not understand that we will fight another to save us from a Red one?’”
Despite its harsh words,
Time
was one of dozens of magazines and newspapers to apply for permission to report from mainland China. When the requests were granted,
New York Herald Tribune
columnist Roscoe Drummond wrote, “This is another signal—cryptic though it may be—that the Kennedy administration is preparing the nation for a new relationship with Communist China . . . and a broader change to the two-decade-old core of U.S. foreign policy.”
To many of those who had shaped and executed that policy, and who still believed in it to their core, there was nothing cryptic about the signal. They would turn to their allies in Congress and in the media to resist what they saw as President Kennedy’s dangerous views. For a few of these men, however, the matter was far more urgent; in fact, it was nothing less than an emergency. The President was pursuing a course that threatened the United States . . . and he had to be stopped.
• • •
This was no group of conspirators that had set out to plot against a president. Many had voted for Kennedy in 1960; some had gone to work in his administration, and still held key posts inside the national security-defense-intelligence complex, while others occupied corner offices in law firms or held tenured posts at prestigious universities. Within that group was a much smaller circle: men who believed that John Kennedy’s course would weaken the nation irreparably. They had watched him flinch from decisive force at the Bay of Pigs and during the missile crisis . . . stage a furtive retreat from South Vietnam . . . begin to bargain away the country’s military superiority over Moscow . . . permit a leftist to assume power in the Dominican Republic . . . and open the door to legitimizing the most militant Communist power on the planet. Their years-long doubts about his ability and character—“a weak leader,” “a coward,” “a degenerate”—had hardened into a blend of contempt and fear: contempt for his judgment and character, fear over where he would leave America when his term ended in 1968.
Look at what he’d done with his staff in his second term. Dean Rusk was out at State, exiled back to the Rockefeller Foundation. Walt Rostow was packing up at his State Department post, from which his stream of memos to the White House had gone largely unread. Now McNamara, that numbers-obsessed technocrat, was at State, with George Ball his chief deputy. And Bobby Kennedy, of all people, was at Defense, driving the Joint Chiefs crazy with his assaults on “waste” and his edicts about racial discrimination.
In their most private of conversations, some of these men pointed to an unhappy accident of fate that had left John Kennedy in the Oval Office. Were it not for the weather in Dallas, Lyndon Johnson
would very likely have become president, with instincts and judgments very different from Kennedy’s. He was, they believed, far more traditional in his approach to America’s adversaries—“You have to treat them like any bully,” he’d long argued, “show them you’re willing to fight and they’ll back down”
—
far more deferential to the recommendations of the military and the wise men of the Democratic Party, the Achesons and Nitzes and Cliffords. During the missile crisis, Johnson had sat virtually silent during the ExComm meetings, but he let it be known later that he would have gone with the Chiefs and taken those missiles out promptly.
Now Johnson was gone, but in Vice President Stuart Symington they saw something of a kindred spirit, with a mind-set firmly anchored in cold war assumptions; one who would never have set out on the path Kennedy was following, and who would not continue on that path should he be in charge.
If Symington was unhappy at Kennedy’s policies, he made it certain that no one but a few intimates knew of it. (He’d be sixty-seven in 1968, but that did not mean he couldn’t try once more for the White House.) Had he known there was a determined effort under way to undermine Kennedy’s hold on the presidency, he would have been appalled. But he didn’t know, and none of those behind the effort had any intention of telling him . . . especially considering the weapon they intended to use.
• • •
Looking back at it, it is nothing short of astounding to realize how many people most hostile to John Kennedy were in possession of damning facts about him—and how limited they were in their willingness or capacity to use that information.
There were Secret Service agents who were dismayed by Kennedy’s behavior, and who felt their own mission compromised by it.
Who were those women coming into the presidential suites on campaign trips, cleared into the White House by Kenny O’Donnell or David Powers or Evelyn Lincoln when Mrs. Kennedy was away? What if the President had a health crisis during those pool parties with young press-office girls while the agents were outside? For all they knew, however, they were bound by a strict code of silence.
J. Edgar Hoover knew
all
the secrets: the affair with a mobster’s mistress; the White House visits by a German embassy employee who moonlighted as a prostitute; the encounters with Hollywood stars. Much as he reviled Kennedy for his conduct, Hoover’s goal was not exposure but the retention of power. There were also longstanding hints that the Kennedys had information about the director that would prove fatal to his own career. It was Dallas, however, where Bobby Kennedy found his ace in the hole: a statement from the Dallas bureau chief that Hoover had personally ordered him to destroy a threatening letter he’d received from Oswald before the shooting. Bobby had made it clear to Hoover that this information would remain secret just as long as Hoover continued to absolve the President of any improper behavior.
Some of the most powerful press barons were deeply conservative, passionately anti-Communist: Henry Luce’s Time-Life empire, the
Reader’s Digest
of the Wallaces, Ben Hibbs’s
Saturday Evening Post
, among others. They were also among the least likely to publish accounts of a public figure’s sexual exploits, at least not openly. (
Time
had an innuendo code: A man’s mistress was “his great and good friend.” A gay man was “a confirmed bachelor.”) Luce himself had his own reasons for discretion: he’d had a string of lovers, and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, had had a long-term affair with the President’s father. As for the
Post
and the
Digest
, they were firmly anchored in a bucolic, bygone pastoral; no hint of extramarital sex ever stained their pages.
In a later era, none of this would have kept these secrets out of the public eye; but in the mid-1960s, the idea of an interconnected population able to distribute and receive information in an instant, able to send audio and video from their homes out into the wider world, was something out of a science fiction fantasy. Communication was a one-way street. If the Katers wanted America to hear what was on the tapes they’d made of John Kennedy and his press aide in her bedroom, they would have to find a radio or TV station to broadcast them, or a record company to put out a recording, or a newspaper to print the transcripts. If a British prostitute claimed to have slept with Kennedy, she’d have to find a publication willing to print that allegation; and (as the
New York Journal-American
reporters had learned) even a veiled reference could provoke the wrath of the extended First Family. Moreover, there were
gatekeepers
in the mid-1960s: newspapers, magazines, and television stations that had a sharply defined and limited sense of what was news, especially if there was no clear proof of misbehavior. If they chose to exclude a public official’s private life, that pretty much confined such stories to rumors and whispers that stayed underground. Sure, there was an appetite for scandal.
Confidential
magazine had proved that in the fifties, when its diet of outing adulterers and homosexuals made it one of the largest-selling magazines in America. Its target was Hollywood celebrities, though, not politicians, and by 1960 a string of lawsuits had effectively neutered it.
For the men who wished to strike a fatal blow at Kennedy’s stature, then, two things were necessary: first, a story so damaging that it would break through the private-life/public-life barrier; second, a willingness on the part of some respectable journalistic force to publish it.