Authors: Jeff Greenfield
I
t’s raining, Mr. President.”
“I’m up,” he said to his valet, George Thomas, through the door of the master bedroom of Suite 850, and walked to the window. His hosts had borrowed priceless paintings from local museums—a Monet, a Picasso, a Van Gogh—but his eyes were drawn to the gloomy weather, and to a large crowd gathered on the sidewalk eight stories below: a fitting blend of bad and good news for this trip.
He’d come to Texas because it had seemed a state crucial to his reelection next year. Its twenty-four electoral votes, won with a margin of only 46,000 votes, had provided a badly needed cushion three years earlier—without them, his election would have rested on a highly questionable 8,000-vote margin in Illinois—and with twenty-five votes this time around, Texas might well have to be his firewall in the South, where his embrace of sweeping civil rights legislation had made his prospects below the Mason-Dixon Line thin at best. It was important enough that he’d persuaded Jackie to join
him: her first political trip since 1960, and one that came just three and a half months after the death of their infant son.
At every stage of the visit so far—from the dedication of the United States Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine in San Antonio, to a Houston dinner for Congressman Albert Thomas, to the motorcade route to and from the airports—the crowds had been large and enthusiastic.
If we get a break in the weather,
he thought,
we can let the crowds get a good look at us here and in Dallas and Austin; maybe that’ll shake some cash loose from the big-money boys.
Only . . . there were clouds hanging over this Texas visit that had nothing to do with the weather.
For one thing, the Democratic Party was in the middle of a full-fledged civil war between conservative Democrats, led by Governor John Connally, and liberals led by Senator Ralph Yarborough. Just before leaving Washington to join the President on Air Force One, Yarborough had learned that he’d been denied a seat at the head table at the big $100-a-plate fund-raiser in Austin and had not been invited to the Governor’s reception later that evening. He’d taken his anger out on Vice President Lyndon Johnson, a key Connally ally, repeatedly refusing increasingly desperate requests from the President’s political team to ride in the motorcades with Johnson.
That had produced exactly the kind of headline John Kennedy did
not
want to see, splashed across the front pages of the Dallas papers: YARBOROUGH SNUBS LBJ, with others inside no better: PRESIDENT’S VISIT SEEN WIDENING STATE DEMOCRATIC SPLIT.
What is it with Lyndon?
he wondered. He’d put him on the ticket in 1960 in the face of puzzlement, even anger, from his liberal and labor supporters, not to mention some of his closest political aides. Kenny O’Donnell had been in shock; Bobby, whose contempt for the Texan didn’t just border on outright hatred but had crossed that
border years ago, had tried three times to talk Johnson off the ticket.
Thank God he hadn’t.
Johnson, riding the “Cornpone Special” across the South, had kept Texas in the Democratic column, and had likely made the difference in the Carolinas and maybe even Missouri. As for rumors that Kennedy might dump Johnson in ’64, he’d brushed them aside: just this week, on a swing through Florida, he’d told his old friend Senator George Smathers, “Lyndon’s going to be my vice president because
I need him
!” But if Lyndon didn’t even have the power to hold Texas Democrats together, and if the civil rights issue was going to make the South a lost cause, then just how much did he need him? Last night he’d summoned Johnson to his suite and told him in no uncertain terms that this public spat between Connally and Yarborough had to be healed, and healed
now
.
Besides, there were these rumors out of Washington and New York that might turn out to be more than just rumors. Johnson’s longtime protégé, Senate secretary Bobby Baker, had just resigned, and the rumors suggested that some of the stories about payoffs and kickbacks were getting very close to the Vice President. And some of the stories were about more than money: they were about prostitutes—“party girls” used to win the favor of important politicians. (He was more than familiar with that side of the story—uncomfortably so.) And one of his reporter friends in the Time-Life empire had passed along to Pierre Salinger another unsettling rumor:
Life
magazine was looking into Johnson’s money—how had a man on the public payroll all his life become a multi-millionaire?
I wonder which one of my geniuses decided to end this trip with a barbecue and an overnight at the LBJ ranch . . . Maybe I can get Rusk or McNamara to gin up a crisis and get me the hell out of there.
He walked across the living room into Jackie’s bedroom, where there was a better view of the crowd on the street below. Her
presence was a gift, he knew; the crowd was here as much for her as for him, and he thought he’d rephrase the line he’d used on their European trip: “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” She and the kids were potent political weapons, and those photo spreads in
Look
magazine—John-John frolicking in the Oval Office, Caroline and her cousins at Hyannis, piling into a golf cart as he drove them for ice cream—were pure gold. God knows, he was going to need the affection of the voters next year . . . because the track record of his administration was something less than overwhelming.
Yes, the economy was good—no inflation, unemployment under 5 percent—but there was a real concern from his economic team that things could be slowing down without a tax cut, and in Congress his own Democratic committee chairs were spooked by the idea that a tax cut was a liberal gimmick that would mean deficits. The civil rights bill he’d embraced was going nowhere; even that huge, peaceful March on Washington last summer hadn’t budged the Southerners who ran the Congress, and the country still told the pollsters that Negroes were pushing too hard, too fast. Things in D.C. were so paralyzed that the press corps had begun to use terms like “gridlock,” “breakdown,” even “constitutional crisis.”
And while there’d been real progress on the foreign front—the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signs of a thaw in the cold war after the Cuban missile crisis of a year ago—there were troubles from one side of the globe to the other. The CIA’s attempts at covert action in Cuba had been as futile as that insane Bay of Pigs invasion; Bobby had been up in their face for two years, and all they’d come up with was to try and depose or kill Castro with the help of American gangsters. He’d begun to think it was time for something different, some kind of live-and-let-live understanding with Castro. That French journalist, Jean Daniel, was meeting with Fidel now; he’d
asked Daniel to get back to him and let him know what Castro was thinking.
And South Vietnam? For almost three years, his advisors had been giving him such conflicting advice that he’d once asked two of them, “Are you sure you went to the same country?” Is the South Vietnamese army, with the help of 15,000 American advisors, making any headway against the Viet Cong guerrillas? Is the government of Ngo Dinh Diem “winning the hearts and minds of the people”? Diem and his brother had seemed more interested in suppressing the Buddhist majority than in dealing with the corruption and incompetence in their government; which is why, three weeks ago, a band of generals (with U.S. support) had overthrown the brothers in a coup—a coup that was
supposed
to leave Diem and Nhu unharmed. Instead, they’d been shot to death in the back of a truck.
And while his Joint Chiefs, and Rusk at State, and Bundy in the White House were telling him, “We can’t let South Vietnam fall; it will endanger all of Southeast Asia,”
others—Ken Galbraith, his Indian ambassador; Senator Mike Mansfield, who knew the region; and General de Gaulle—were telling him,
It’s a quagmire, if you go in with an army, you’ll never get out.
His own George Ball had said flatly, that if the United States went in with ground troops, it would have 300,000 or more in a year or two. (That idea was nuts, of course—he’d told George that—but still . . .) As for his own instincts? Well, just yesterday in Washington, at the end of a meeting with a young State Department aide, Mike Forrestal, he’d beckoned him back into the Oval Office.
“Wait a minute,” he’d said. “After the first of the year, I want you to organize an in-depth study of every possible option we’ve got in Vietnam, including how to get out. We have to review this whole thing from the bottom to the top.”
But he was also a man of finely honed political instincts, and they told him he couldn’t cut his losses now, even if he wanted to—not with an election coming up, not with the prospect that the Republicans would yell “Who lost Vietnam?” just the way they—and a lot of Democrats—had yelled “Who lost China?” at Truman back in ’49 (hell, as a young congressman, he’d been one of them). That’s why he’d told O’Donnell, Mansfield, and everyone else that nothing was going to happen until
after
he was reelected. For God’s sake, all anyone had to do was look at the full-page ad in the
Dallas Morning News
, bordered in black, paid for by H. L. Hunt and a group of Dallas businessmen on the far right, more or less accusing him of treason.
“We’re heading into nut country today,” he’d said to Jackie, not mentioning to her that his UN ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, had been met with such a violent demonstration at a recent speech that Adlai had passed the word to the White House that it might be just as well for the President not to go to that city. But there was no way he was going to Texas without a stop in its second biggest city.
And as for that reelection? He knew what the polls were saying: that his job approval rating had dropped sharply, from 76 to 59 percent, most of it coming from the South’s response to civil rights. He knew that racial splits were opening up—over jobs, housing, crime—in the big cities of the North, dividing white working-class voters from blacks and thus cleaving the old Roosevelt-Truman coalition further. (Was Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace serious about running against him in Democratic primaries outside the South?)
And he also knew that he could not count on the Republicans to nominate Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, the conservative hero whose pronouncements about nuclear weapons were bound to paint him as a figure outside the mainstream. “If Barry’s the nominee,”
he’d said a week ago to his political team, “I won’t have to leave Washington.” A candidate like New York’s Nelson Rockefeller or Michigan’s George Romney, though . . . that could be a problem.
But if he was concerned that his hold on the White House was not as firm as he might wish it to be, there was comfort, a kind of reassurance, in remembering how often pure, random chance had governed his life; so many times in the past, going back years—even decades—a small turn of fate would have ensured that he never made it to the White House at all.
IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE JOE
Joe was the firstborn son of one of the country’s wealthiest men, who had once pondered the presidency for himself before his ally turned nemesis Franklin Roosevelt ran for a third term. No less than a nobleman of other times and realms, Joe Kennedy Sr. embraced primogeniture, and in his namesake son, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., it seemed as if the gods had agreed. Tall, muscular, strikingly handsome, he projected assurance, confidence, command. At Choate, he’d been a leader in the classroom and on the field and earned the Harvard Cup, given to the student who embraced excellence in scholastics and athletics. At Harvard, he’d been a star in football, rugby, crew. And he made no secret of his intentions, telling one of his tutors—a young economist named John Kenneth Galbraith—“When I get to the White House, I’m taking you with me.”
His father’s counsel to him over the years had always been given with an eye on the main prize. He’d persuaded Joe to switch his major from philosophy to government. When Joe was at Harvard Law School, he wrote: “Get yourself signed up and possibly make some speeches in the fall in the campaign throughout
Massachusetts. It would be a very interesting experience and you could work up two or three subjects you wanted to discuss throughout the state.” When Joe Sr.’s father-in-law, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald entered a primary battle for the U.S. Senate in 1942, father wrote son that Fitz’s primary opponent was facing “a lot of criticism by the Catholic women that [he’d] married a Protestant . . . I am thoroughly convinced that an Irish Catholic with a name like yours, and your record, married to an Irish Catholic girl, would be a pushover in this State for a political office.”
But there were complications. Joe Jr. was very much his father’s son, far more so than his younger brother; he embraced Joe Sr.’s anti-interventionist views, joining organizations closely allied with the America First movement, cautioning that the U.S. military was simply not ready for war. Privately, at least as a young man, he had reflected some of his father’s antipathy toward Jews. Writing Joe Sr. from Germany in the summer of 1934, he’d argued:
“The German people were scattered, despondent, and were divorced from hope. Hitler came in. He saw the need of a common enemy. Someone of whom to make the goat . . . It was too bad that it had to be done with the Jews, [but] this dislike of the Jews was well founded.”
So while any politically ambitious young man would have sought a military record once World War II broke out, it was even more crucial for Joe Jr. to separate himself from his father’s long record of appeasement, and to erase any questions about his own stands. He was drafted out of Harvard Law, signed up as a naval aviator, and by 1944 had flown more than twenty-five missions, surviving a number of dogfights with the Luftwaffe in the process. That was more than enough to entitle him to come home, but something was keeping him in combat—quite possibly the emergence of his younger brother Jack as an authentic war hero, celebrated in front-page newspaper
stories after his PT boat was sunk in the Solomon Islands a year earlier. (Jack had mordantly noted once that “it would be good for Joe’s political career if he died for the grand old flag, but I don’t believe he feels that is absolutely necessary.”)