Reclaiming History (11 page)

The most painful of his multiple disabilities is his back, which never ceases tormenting him and even causes him to use crutches or a cane in private.
⁴¹
One of his shoes has a quarter-inch riser in it, he wears a stiff, six-inch-wide elastic corset to immobilize his lower back, and he sleeps on a special bedboard of thick plywood with a five-inch horsehair pad. Two of these Spartan devices follow him wherever he goes. By 1954, Kennedy’s back pain “had become almost unbearable. X-rays showed that the 5th lumbar vertebra had collapsed, most likely the consequence of the corticosteroids he was taking for the Addison’s disease. He could not bend down to pull a sock on his left foot and he had to climb and descend stairs moving sideways.”
⁴²
In 1954, he again was given the last rites when he fell into a coma after a risky operation to fuse the deteriorating vertebrae—with no better than a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. Because of his condition, the family has stashed small quantities of deoxycorticosterone acetate, or DOCA, the powerful corticoid drug that might save his life in the event of another crisis, in safe deposit boxes all over America.
⁴³
His brother Robert, the attorney general, is one of the few who knows that Jack spends half the hours of his life in pain.
*

The president finishes shaving and begins the arduous task of wrapping himself firmly in his back brace.
⁴⁴
As he slips on his shirt, he decides to have a look at the crowd in the parking lot eight floors below. He can’t see them from where he is, so he tiptoes into his wife’s bedroom.

“Gosh, look at the crowd!” he beams.

About five thousand people are down there, hemmed in by two loan companies, two bus stations, a garage, a theater, and mounted police in rain-wet yellow slickers. The politician in him is pleased. It looks like a great crowd, mostly working men—Texas senator Ralph Yarborough’s constituency—tough men who don’t mind a bit of rain, with a few secretaries from nearby office buildings. They had begun to gather about two hours before dawn to see and hear the president. He appreciates every opportunity to show himself to ordinary people. He needs every one of their votes. He tells Jackie he’ll see her later at breakfast in the hotel, where he is meeting with the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. In the meantime she can catch another hour of sleep.
⁴⁵

Jackie is still recovering from the death of their infant son Patrick, who died just forty hours after his birth in August. Only those close to the First Family know how devastating the loss was for both of them. Jack had wept hard, and in his grief had put his arms around the small white casket at the grave site. Jackie didn’t leave the hospital until four days after the funeral, and her emotional convalescence was long. Once, when Jack was comforting her, she told him, “There’s just one thing I couldn’t stand—if I ever lost you.”
⁴⁶

Jackie has tried hard to put the trauma of that sorrowful event behind her, and even though she has never campaigned with him before, the dark-haired beauty with a European elegance who disdains the vulgarity of politics can muster a practical gesture on occasion, and she volunteered to make this trip to Texas. To everyone’s delight, she actually seems to be enjoying herself, prompting the president to ask her if she would like to accompany him on a forthcoming trip to the West Coast, and she said yes. After leaving the White House the previous morning, the president and Jackie had flown to San Antonio, where Vice President Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, joined the presidential party, and the president had dedicated new research facilities at the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine. The four had then flown to Houston in the late afternoon for a testimonial dinner that evening for U.S. Representative Albert Thomas. (There had been motorcades through both San Antonio and Houston.) They arrived in Fort Worth after 11:00 p.m., leaving very little time to sleep and get ready for another vigorous day that would end that night with a fund-raising dinner in Austin. Then back to Washington, D.C., on Saturday morning in time for their son John-John’s third birthday on Monday.
⁴⁷
Jack is grateful to Jackie for accompanying him on the trip and being such a trooper. He knows her presence is an enormous plus, but doesn’t want to put her under any more strain than absolutely necessary. He slips out of her bedroom and quietly pulls the door shut.

The president, who loves a good cigar from time to time, reaches a friend, James Chambers Jr., on the phone. “Can you get me some Macanudo cigars?” Kennedy asks. “They don’t have any over here in Forth Worth.” Chambers, president of the
Dallas Times Herald
, is delighted to hear from the president and answers, “Sure.” “Well, get me about a half a dozen.” “Fine,” Chambers says. He goes to the United Cigar store in Dallas and gets the president six expensive Macanudo cigars. He’ll give them to the president at the luncheon scheduled that day at the Trade Mart.
⁴⁸
The president finishes a light breakfast consisting of coffee and a roll, and is knotting his tie and fastening it with the obligatory PT 109 tie clip when David F. Powers, one of his closest friends and confidants, enters the suite. The president lets him know how thrilled he is over the crowd awaiting him below, speaks of the great crowds in San Antonio and Houston yesterday, and the brilliant reception accorded Jackie, who is turning into the star of the whole show. It seems that most of the crowds have come to see her rather than the president.
⁴⁹

8:30 a.m.

Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, Kennedy’s air force aide, comes into the president’s suite with the CIA situation report on Saigon, Cyprus, and Korea, which the president looks over. He also scans the leading metropolitan dailies.
⁵⁰

The news for November 22, 1963, is pretty light: a Labour victory in a British by-election; a Soviet note complaining about American convoys to Berlin; the death of the “Birdman of Alcatraz” at the age of seventy-three; the trial of Jimmy Hoffa in Nashville—brother Bobby’s doing; and the removal of a portrait of the president from an American Legion Post wall in Abilene because he is “controversial.” The crucial news—for a president all too aware that his trip to the South to shore up support for next year’s election, and how he is received in Texas, represent the real beginning of the campaign for his reelection—is the squabble in the Texas Democratic Party between its conservative and liberal wings.

An editorial in the
Chicago Sun-Times
confirms his instinct about the value on this matter of the enthusiastic reception Jackie has received thus far on the Texas trip: “Some Texans, in taking account of the tangled Texas political situation, have begun to think that Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy may turn the balance and win her husband this state’s electoral vote.” Other papers are less reassuring. The front-page headline stories in the
Dallas Morning News
hammer the point home: “Storm of Political Controversy Swirls around Kennedy on Visit”; “Yarborough Snubs LBJ”; and “President’s Visit Seen Widening State Democratic Split.”
⁵¹
But one of the main purposes behind the Texas trip was to narrow this split, bridge the gap between the two factions, which would help not only the Democratic Party in Texas, but, with a united front, Kennedy’s own reelection effort in the state.
⁵²
*

In recent days and weeks, although Dallas’s morning paper has been carrying plenty in its front pages about the widening chasm in the state’s Democratic Party, the paper’s emphasis this morning in its lead editorial is simple, extending a welcoming hand to the young president as he arrives in a city, it says, “with a substantial Republican representation.”
⁵³
The previous day, former vice president Richard Nixon, in town for a bottler’s convention, urged Dallas residents to give President and Mrs. Kennedy “a courteous reception.”
⁵⁴
United States Attorney Barefoot Sanders says he is investigating whether certain scurrilous leaflets—apparently mugshots of Kennedy captioned “Wanted For Treason,”
⁵⁵
five thousand of which appeared on the streets the previous day and that morning—violate federal laws. Dallas police chief Jesse E. Curry says anybody caught distributing them will be arrested for littering,
⁵⁶
and in a press conference on Wednesday, November 20, says that “nothing must occur that is disrespectful or degrading to the President of the United States. He is entitled to the highest respect, and the law enforcement agencies of this area are going to do everything possible to insure that no untoward incident” takes place. “We will take immediate action if any suspicious conduct is observed, and we also urge all good citizens to be alert for such conduct…Citizens themselves may take preventative action if it becomes obvious that someone is planning to commit an act harmful or degrading to the president…I am sure that all but a handful of our citizens will cordially welcome the president of the United States to Dallas.” Curry said 350 Dallas policemen, about a third of the force, would be assigned to the Kennedy guard detail, and this would be supplemented by forty state police and fifteen Dallas deputy sheriffs. Police officials said it was the largest security detail ever assembled in Dallas.
⁵⁷
*

The businessmen of Dallas, not natural Kennedy supporters, have nonetheless made it clear to Curry that they want his eleven-hundred-man force to do everything possible to ensure that there be no incidents, however trivial, during the presidential visit. A front-page article in the
Dallas Morning News
of November 17, 1963, was captioned “Incident-Free Day Urged for JFK Visit,” and quoted Dallas leaders such as the president of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce and the county Republican chairman asking Dallas citizens to put aside politics and accord the president of the United States a very warm and hospitable welcome. Dallas, a notorious hotbed for right-wing conservatives, simply couldn’t afford any repetition of last month’s Stevenson incident. What happened to UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson in Dallas shocked America and gave Dallas a black eye. On October 24, UN Day, after speaking optimistically about world peace through the United Nations to an audience of five thousand people, Stevenson was jeered by a mob of unruly demonstrators, hit in the head with an anti-UN picket sign carried by a woman, and spat upon as he left Dallas’s municipal auditorium and was being escorted to his limousine.
⁵⁸
The following day, one hundred Dallas civic and business leaders sent a telegram to Stevenson apologizing profusely and saying the city was “outraged and abjectly ashamed of the disgraceful discourtesies you suffered at the hands of a small group of extremists.”
⁵⁹
Mayor Earle Cabell lashed out at the “right wing fanatics” responsible for the Stevenson incident, saying these “so-called patriots” were “not conservatives” but “radicals” who had become “a cancer in the body politic.”
⁶⁰

And it’s not just the lunatic right-wing fringe that was capable of the Stevenson kind of incident. Back in 1960, then-senator Lyndon Johnson (years before his civil rights legislation, when few perceived him as liberal) and his wife Lady Bird had been spat upon at Dallas’s Adolphus hotel—and the Johnsons were Texans. Some members of Kennedy’s staff opposed his visiting Dallas, being the cauldron of conservatism it was, and indeed the state itself, much of Texas not being favorably disposed to the president. And Stevenson, as well as Byron Skelton, the National Democratic committeeman from Texas, urged Kennedy not to make the trip. From 1961 to 1962, the Secret Service had recorded thirty-four threats on the president’s life from Texas.
⁶¹

Kennedy overlooks another article about Nixon in the same paper—“Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson.”
*
Jack Kennedy, though elected by a mere handful of votes over Nixon in 1960 (Kennedy’s margin of victory was one-tenth of 1 percent, receiving 34,221,355 votes to Nixon’s 34,109,398), has nevertheless been popular with most Americans from the beginning of his administration. His approval rating soared to 83 percent in April 1961, ironically in the wake of his biggest failure, the abortive invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. By now, though, three years after his election, it has slumped to 59 percent. Just last month, in October,
Newsweek
estimated that Kennedy’s pro-black position on the civil rights issue had cost him 3.5 million votes and reported that no Democratic president had ever been so disliked in the South. In Georgia the marquee of a movie theater showing the film
PT 109
read, “See how the Japs almost got Kennedy.”
⁶²
Indeed, less than two months earlier, the chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party had persuaded JFK to cancel a speech in Atlanta because of the political climate in his state resulting from JFK’s pending civil rights bill.
⁶³
However, Kennedy did include Florida on the trip that took him to Dallas, since Florida had gone Republican in 1960.
⁶⁴
The South, overwhelmingly Democratic in presidential elections since the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, was more conservative than any other region of the country. But the long-standing distrust by southerners for the Republican Party (northern Republicans were largely responsible for Reconstruction, which brought the former Confederate states back into the United States and was unpopular in the South) was showing signs everywhere of melting away.

Kennedy can ill afford to lose those southern votes to Barry Goldwater, the conservative senator from Arizona who appears to have a lock on the Republican nomination for president. Texas voted for Kennedy over Nixon in 1960 by a mere 46,233 votes out of more than two million cast (he lost in Dallas, the only large American city to vote for Nixon over Kennedy), mostly owing to Lyndon Johnson’s presence on the ticket. Texas, being conservative, had voted for Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956.
⁶⁵
Texas’s senior senator, Ralph Yarborough, also accounted for a lot of votes by appealing to the state’s dwindling, old-style liberals and unionists. Texas, three years later, now looks weak for the Kennedy ticket, and it is Kennedy’s own suggestion and desire to come to Texas to raise money and to try to appeal to the business community (which was suspicious of him) and the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, thereby enhancing his political fortunes there.
⁶⁶
He couldn’t have a better forum to appeal to that group than at the luncheon that noon. The Dallas Citizens Council, an informal organization of the leading businessmen of Dallas which had been a “behind-the-scenes force in Dallas affairs” for years, was the main sponsor of the luncheon.
⁶⁷
Governor Connally tells his wife and others, “Nellie, if the people of Texas can just get a look at him, up close, I know they will vote for him.”
⁶⁸