An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (106 page)

In April 1963, when
Newsweek
journalist James M. Cannon interviewed the president for an article about his brother Joe, Cannon “was struck first by the serenity of the [Oval Office] surroundings and the self-possession of the principal.” Cannon recorded in some notes he made on the meeting, “In this man, at this moment, there was no evidence that he was worn with the cares of office. He was casual. He was affable. He was unhurried, unbadgered . . . .‘How are you doing?’ I said. ‘I must say you
look
fine. From all appearances, the job seems to be agreeing with you.’ ‘Well,’ he said, with a big smile, ‘I think it’s going well. As you know we do have our ups and downs, the tides ebb and flow. . . . [But] in general, I think things are going well.’”

Kennedy’s self-assurance registered not only on White House insiders and Americans more generally but also on Western Europeans. His popularity with them,
Time
magazine journalist John Steele privately told the White House, was “at an exceedingly high, really inspired level.” The British were ready to consider Kennedy the initiator of a family dynasty: They expected the president to have a second term, followed by the attorney general for eight years and then the senator from Massachusetts. (“Whatever other deficiencies the family may have, it is abundantly supplied with heirs,” one English writer observed.) Pressed to provide some philosophical wisdom about the position, Kennedy joked, “I have a nice home, the office is close by and the pay is good.” His quick wit about his family and politics was on display at a 1963 gala: “I was proud of the Attorney General’s first appearance before the Supreme Court yesterday,” he solemnly declared. “He did a very good job, according to everyone I talked to: Ethel, Jackie, Teddy.” Bobby’s performance showed that “he does have broader interests—that he isn’t limited to the slogan: ‘Stop the world—I want to get Hoffa.’” Kennedy also made light of the resistance to his legislative proposals: “With all our contacts in show business and culture,” he said, “the Democrats should make some progress. I’m trying to get [television series doctors] Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey to support my Medicare bill. And Kirk Douglas said he would support my proposals to strengthen the nation’s economy with a tax cut. In fact, he said he’s willing to go all the way and pay no taxes at all.” During a presidential briefing breakfast with economic advisers, Kennedy turned aside criticism with good humor. When a favorable review for right-wing columnist Victor Lasky’s book
JFK: The Man and the Myth
came up, the president recalled the only time he had been at the reviewer’s home, where he had been served “some kind of orange pop, and people sat stiffly around.” Kennedy jokingly added, “Never trust a man who serves only soft drinks.”

By October 1963, Kennedy had established the sort of rapport with the public that had made Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Truman in 1948, and Ike so popular. The death in August 1963 of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, a baby born five weeks before term, only deepened the public’s ties to the president and Jackie. The loss registered on millions of Americans, who sympathized with the Kennedys and identified with their vulnerability to human suffering. Picking up on an item in the
New York Times—
“As they walked out of the Presidential office, Mr. Kennedy took a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the boy’s nose”—
New Yorker
editor E. B. White composed an affectionate poem about JFK:

A President’s work is never done,

His burdens press from sun to sun:

A Berlin wall, a racial brew,

A tax cut bill, a Madame Nhu.

One crisis ebbs, another flows —

And here comes John with a runny nose:

A President must rise and dress,

See senators, and meet the press,

Be always bold, be sometimes wary,

Be kind to foreign dignitary,

And while he’s fending off our foes

Bend down and wipe a little boy’s nose.

BUT FOR ALL
his occasional insouciance, Kennedy never lost sight of the limitations and frustrations all presidents face. “Every President,” he wrote in 1963, “must endure a gap between what he would like and what is possible.” He was also fond of FDR’s observation that “Lincoln was a sad man because he couldn’t get it all at once. And nobody can.” When James Reston pressed him to say what he hoped to achieve by the end of his term, Kennedy, Reston said, “looked at me as if I were a dreaming child. I tried again: Did he not feel the need of some goal to help guide his day-to-day decisions and priorities? Again a ghastly pause. It was only when I turned the question to immediate, tangible problems that he seized the point and rolled off a torrent of statistics.” It was not that Kennedy was without larger hopes and goals—better race relations and less poverty in America and improved East-West relations, with diminished likelihood of nuclear war, were never far from his mind. But it was the practical daily challenges standing in the way of larger designs that held his attention and seemed to him the principal stuff of being president.

By 1963 Kennedy had few doubts about his suitability for the presidency. But his self-confidence did not include the conviction that he was politically invulnerable. He understood that his political fortunes could change overnight—that unanticipated events could suddenly undermine his popularity and make him vulnerable to defeat in 1964. And the source of his eclipse could come from revelations about private behavior as well as from a downturn in public affairs or a stumble in handling a domestic or foreign crisis.

In March, when Schlesinger returned from a trip to England, he had given the president news of an emerging embarrassment involving John Profumo, Macmillan’s war minister, who had been having an extramarital affair with Christine Keeler, a twenty-one-year-old call girl who was also the mistress of a Soviet deputy naval attaché. Even though no one could prove that Profumo had given away state secrets, his indiscretion made Macmillan’s government vulnerable to collapse. A Gallup poll Schlesinger brought to Kennedy’s attention in June showed 71 percent of British voters favoring either Macmillan’s resignation or dissolution of parliament and a test of his popularity in a general election.

Kennedy’s interest in the scandal had been evident to Ben Bradlee, who later described the president as having “devoured every word about the Profumo case; it combined so many of the things that interested him: low doings in high places, the British nobility, sex and spying.” After someone in the state department sent Kennedy a cable from U.S. ambassador David Bruce recounting the details of the case, Kennedy “ordered all further cables from Bruce on that subject sent to him immediately.” And it was concern about Profumo fallout that led Kennedy to visit Macmillan in Sussex instead of London.

Kennedy saw the Profumo scandal as a cautionary tale. In June, when he discussed civil rights with Martin Luther King at the White House, he took King for a walk in the Rose Garden, where he warned him to disassociate himself from Levison and O’Dell. “You’ve read about Profumo in the newspapers?” the president asked King. “That was an example of friendship and loyalty carried too far. Macmillan is likely to lose his government because he has been loyal to his friend. You must take care not to lose your cause for the same reason.” King replied that the accusations against Levison could not be true. (King remembered that Kennedy “turned red and shook.” But understanding that continuing ties to O’Dell would strain relations with Kennedy and might weaken administration support for reform legislation, King put O’Dell on notice that he would have to quit the SCLC. Because Kennedy wanted O’Dell fired immediately, the White House leaked a story to the
Birmingham News
about his communist ties that forced King to act at once. Similarly, the Kennedys brought additional pressure to bear on King to distance himself from Levison. When King tried to finesse the issue by proposing to communicate with Levison only through a mutual friend, Bobby ordered FBI wiretaps on the friend. Levison himself solved the problem by volunteering to break off all communications with King.)

Kennedy also worried that the Profumo scandal might directly embarrass him. On June 29, a week after he had spoken with King, the
New York Journal-American
published a front-page story about a “high elected American official” and Suzy Chang, a New York prostitute, who was living in England and was part of the Keeler vice or “V-girl” ring. Chang privately claimed that she had slept with Kennedy and eaten dinner with him at the “21” club in New York when he was a senator. To head off potential damage to his brother, on July 1 Bobby asked the two
Journal-American
reporters who had published the story to meet with him at the Justice Department. They claimed that the “high official” was the president of the United States. Bobby chided them for publishing a story “without any further check to get to the truth of the matter.” One of the reporters said “he had other sources of a confidential nature.” An FBI agent, who sat in on the meeting, reported to Hoover that Bobby “treated the newspaper representatives at arms’ length and the conference ended most coolly and, in fact, there was almost an air of hostility between the Attorney General and the reporters.” According to Seymour Hersh, Bobby used his considerable influence with the Hearst family, who owned the
Journal-American,
to squelch the story.

Yet Bobby and his brother understood, as their friend Charlie Bartlett pointed out in a 1963 syndicated column, that no president has an iron-clad hold on the press: “Gratitude stirred by favors has an immensely transient quality, particularly among newsmen whose attentions must shift rapidly, and the solid ingratiation of a vast press corps with an independent tradition would be an enterprise beyond the capacities of any set of officials.”

Two days after Bobby saw the
Journal-American
reporters, he confronted another potential scandal that seemed even more threatening to the president’s political future. On July 3, Hoover advised Bobby of accusations that Kennedy had been involved with a German-born twenty-seven-year-old call girl, Ellen Rometsch, who might be an East German spy. Rometsch had grown up in East Germany, where she had belonged to communist youth groups and allegedly worked as a secretary for Walter Ulbricht, the head of the DDR, before fleeing to the West. A dark-haired beauty described as an Elizabeth Taylor lookalike, Rometsch was introduced to Kennedy by Senate secretary Bobby Baker, who had long made call girls available to senators and other high-government officials. In the spring and summer of 1963, Rometsch apparently made repeated visits to the White House, where she attended naked pool parties and had sex with Kennedy.

The danger from any revelations about the president’s involvement with Rometsch was not lost on Bobby. Though he told Hoover’s assistant Courtney Evans, who briefed Bobby on the rumors, that unfounded allegations about prominent people were common, Evans recorded that the attorney general “made particular note of Rometsch’s name.” Bobby also expressed appreciation for Hoover’s discretion in privately informing him of the stories. While the FBI investigated the accusations, Bobby ensured that Rometsch herself would not embarrass the president with leaks to the press about their trysts. On August 21, he arranged to have her deported to West Germany. Her escort on the flight to Europe was LaVern Duffy, an old Bobby associate on the Senate Rackets Committee in the fifties, who had been seeing Rometsch romantically for months and now became the conduit for Kennedy money buying her silence.

But Rometsch’s distance from potentially inquisitive American reporters and an agreement not to discuss her relations with Kennedy did not eliminate the possibility of a public scandal. In September 1963, Republicans on the Senate Rules Committee began looking into allegations that Bobby Baker had engaged in influence peddling and other ethical violations. On October 7, Baker gave up his Senate position and devoted himself to combating the investigation. Understanding that the White House and Senate Democrats could squelch the probe, Baker tried to enlist Bobby’s support. The unspoken understanding between them was that Bobby—who disliked Baker and his strongest ally, Johnson—would not encourage the Senate inquiry, and in turn, Baker would sit on information about the president and Rometsch. But with evidence of Baker’s wrongdoing mounting, no one could hold back an investigation.

Moreover, a story on October 26 in the
Des Moines Register
by the well-regarded investigative reporter Clark Mollenhoff brought the Rometsch scandal to public attention. Mollenhoff raised questions about Rometsch’s deportation and cited allegations of associations between the “party girl” and “several high executive branch officials” described as “prominent New Frontiersmen from the executive branch of government.” The story more than caught Kennedy’s attention. “The President came in all excited about the news reports concerning the German woman & other prostitutes getting mixed up with government officials, Congressmen, etc.,” Evelyn Lincoln noted in her diary on Monday, October 28. “He called Mike Mansfield to come to the office to discuss the playing down of this news report.” Mollenhoff’s story said nothing about Rometsch’s possible East German ties, which would have made his revelations as sensational as those about Profumo and would have made Kennedy as vulnerable as Macmillan, who lost power in October 1963. The president instructed O’Donnell to get every White House aide on record as having had nothing to do with any Baker call girls.