Read Surrounded by Enemies Online
Authors: Bryce Zabel
For the first hours after the article was published, the reporting duo of Altman and Berkowitz owned the story and appeared to own it alone. Not only was nobody else touching it, but many journalistic organizations were expressing chagrin that
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had cheapened journalism forever by printing it, whether or not its facts were accurate. The reporting team and its editors were starting to swing in the wind. As it turned out, however, this condition was only temporary.
By Tuesday morning, it was Standing Room Only in the White House briefing room. Not only were the hundreds of questions raised by the
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article on the table, but so was the firing of J. Edgar Hoover, which had become public overnight but had not yet been confirmed by the White House. Altman and Berkowitz were treated as celebrities by some of their fellow reporters and as pariahs by a substantial group as well. The truth was, everyone now knew their names and everyone had read their work.
In the Oval Office, President Kennedy huddled with his advisers, discussing how to handle the questions they knew were coming. Of course the President would stand on privacy as regards to the actual names and allegations. That left plenty of room to discuss the peripheral issues. How was it possible that the FBI was keeping such a file on the President of the United States for so long? Why had it been leaked? By whom?
The firing of J. Edgar Hoover did much to draw the public’s attention to those issues. Reaction ranged from, “JFK should have fired him a long time ago,” the Democratic talking point, to, “This shows how dangerously out of control this President has become,” on the Republican side. Kennedy caught one break, however, in that Hoover decided to go into hiding himself, refusing requests for interviews, cursing at photographers and generally looking like a guilty man.
Finally, Mrs. Lincoln interrupted: “The First Lady is here.”
Together, President Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy walked from the Oval Office to the White House Briefing Room. This again was one of the times when the President needed no introduction, from Salinger or anyone else. There was an audible gasp from the hardened reporters when the First Couple entered. As they had in Dallas on the day of the assassination attempt, the two of them looked sensational. If there had been crying or arguing since the article’s publication, you could not tell by looking.
These days the idea of the political wife standing by her man who has been caught in a sex scandal is a cliché. We have seen it with President Bill Clinton, Senator Gary Hart, and too many more to list. But in 1965, particularly in the White House, this was a first. The President stepped to the microphone, and the First Lady stood to the side. She seemed quiet and subdued, but she did not look defeated.
I’ll make a short statement, and then I’ll take your questions. Mrs. Kennedy will not be taking your questions at her request, and she asks that you respect her wishes. As is always the case here at the White House, multiple issues occupy our minds. The most important today, from the position of government, is the issue of the firing of FBI Director Hoover. I am the responsible officer of this government and that decision was mine. I made it not because of the article that appeared yesterday in
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magazine but because of what that article represented. According to both Mr. Altman and Mr. Berkowitz, who I see are here today, they began their reporting when FBI files were released to them without authorization. Additionally, those files deal with private matters that the Bureau should not have been investigating. Until yesterday, Mr. Hoover was the responsible officer at the FBI. He has approved illegal wiretaps of the President and also of other private citizens. He did not maintain proper custody of those files whether they were legally or illegally obtained. That is a fireable offense and so, the director has been fired. I’ll take your questions.
Those questions came in a full-throated roar from a room that was already swooning from all the compressed body heat. By prearrangement, JFK pointed to UPI’s Helen Thomas for the first question: “Whether or not Mr. Hoover deserves to be fired, Mr. President, most Americans today are wondering, did you do all the things that those FBI files say you did?”
Kennedy, with his innate sense of timing, spoke directly to the forty-five-year-old Thomas. “Helen, I was hoping if I picked you first, you’d ask something easier.” It got a laugh that bought the President a few seconds. One laugh was all he could play for, however, given that his deeply wronged wife stood next to him.
The short answer is no. The difficulty with that answer, however, is that many of you would like me to go through those files and what has been made of them and respond to each and every accusation, and that is something that I cannot and will not do. I will say, however, that the issues raised are deeply painful to my wife, and I am humbled by the damage my actions have caused my marriage. Jacqueline and I have been married for a number of years now and hope to be married for the rest of our lives. I will answer your question — not before this group but to her. I will ask her forgiveness in the privacy of our marriage, not in the publicity of the moment.
It was a good answer, particularly the look he gave his wife when talking about their marriage, but no one in the room thought for a moment that it would suffice. Reporters came after him in waves, and his answer was always a rephrasing of his response to Thomas. It is worth mentioning that neither Frank Altman nor Steve Berkowitz was called upon by the President that day, nor ever again, no matter how often or how loudly they shouted their questions.
The news conference was notable for one turn of a phrase that has often been credited to Theodore Sorensen, but actually came from President Kennedy himself, on the spur of the moment. He was asked by NBC’s David Brinkley what he made of any possible motivation for the FBI to have gathered all this material for years only to unleash it now in 1965.
“There were apparently some who wished my presidency might have ended back in 1963,” said Kennedy. “Yet here I am still in the White House in 1965 with a full-term ahead of me. Perhaps some of those people feel that a sniper firing a rifle at a man is only one way to assassinate him.”
The room, so boisterous at the beginning, fell momentarily silent. Rarely has the truth been spoken so clearly in a situation where it is so often hidden.
The press conference answered almost no questions except for one. Would Jackie Kennedy stand by her man? At least temporarily, it seemed, the answer was yes.
On the way out with her husband, one reporter pushed his luck enough to shout at Jackie Kennedy, “Mrs. Kennedy, did you know about any of this before you read about it?”
She seemed taken aback and stammered only the word, “Oh,” before the President grasped her forearm and led her from the room. “Jackie Oh” caught on as her nickname and followed her until her death in 1994.
If Jackie Kennedy would not talk, then reporters seemed to be of the mind to find someone who would. The article and the news conference unleashed the investigative force of the Washington journalistic establishment as reporters sought response from all of the suspected paramours of the President. More than a few who had respected their vows of silence regarding their sexual liaisons with Kennedy, now found themselves completely out of their depth. It was one thing to remain silent when few if anyone knew you had anything to say, and another thing entirely when reporters and photographers were waiting on the street outside your home.
The “other women” became household names. Within a week, arguments were breaking out as to whether Priscilla Wear was Fiddle or Faddle. But it was Jill Cowan (Faddle) who famously confirmed her relationship with the President when she told a reporter, “If you think it was just about sex, then you don’t know President Kennedy at all.”
All legal issues aside, the nation seemed transfixed by the state of the Kennedy marriage, with men and women often finding themselves on opposite sides of the issue. A Gallup Poll released at this time showed that 58 percent of women — Republicans and Democrats in nearly equal numbers — agreed with the statement that “If current revelations of multiple affairs are true, Jackie Kennedy should consider divorce proceedings against President Kennedy.” Only 29 percent of men felt the same way.
Most of the pillars of the fourth estate, pressed for an honest reaction, admitted that news of Kennedy’s secret life was widely known and probably would have dribbled out bit by bit over decades had the story been contained until his term expired in 1969. These explosive revelations, made suddenly and with a completeness that was stunning, simply demanded follow-up and independent investigation. By the end of the first week following publication, everyone had reporters on the job: the
New York Times
,
Washington Post
,
Wall Street Journal
,
Time
,
Newsweek
and all the TV networks.
Suddenly, things that were known about the President’s medical condition, the allegations about associations with mobsters, election money-laundering and even attempts to assassinate foreign leaders like Castro were under investigation.
The American people were stunned. It wasn’t as if the President had just been discovered having an affair. That might have been tolerable or understandable for some people (although not the Catholics in Kennedy’s own church) but the sheer numbers of women he had been involved with said something else entirely. It was reckless to be sure, given his office, but it was more than that. It seemed to be completely unhinged behavior. Today we might call it sex addiction, but in 1965 the right words were more difficult to find.
Initially, because the President wouldn’t confirm or deny any specifics, it was the Republican party that condemned him most strongly, while Democrats took a wait-and-see approach. The problem with that strategy was that the more anyone waited, the more they saw.
It was all anyone talked about. Americans felt they knew John Kennedy, so hearing the news of his fall from grace was like hearing the same thing about a close friend. The twin nature of the revelations — sexual feats and medical disabilities — led to a robust comedy take in the nation’s barber shops and taverns, places where men gathered with other men out of earshot of the women in their lives.
The comedian Lenny Bruce — famous for a controversial style that would have barely raised an eyebrow these days — had just over a year left to live when the story of the President’s risk-taking private life surfaced and became a top item on the national agenda. Health aside, Bruce was feeling in a particularly angry mood, given his conviction the year before on obscenity charges arising from his act. No stranger to substance abuse or promiscuity, and looking for some material he could ride back to the top, Bruce embraced the Kennedy story as his new cause. Not even a call from Bobby Kennedy, thanking him for his support but asking him to tone down his act, could get him to back off. Two days after the article broke, Bruce had a microphone and a New York audience:
How about that fucking JFK? And by fucking JFK, well, that’s exactly what I mean. This man, it turns out, is a complete fuck machine. Now, I know we’re all supposed to be shocked and appalled by the fact that the man has seen more poontang in his time in office than anybody I know will see in a lifetime. I’m not shocked, I’m in awe. Look, say what you will, but instead of the man screwing us, he’s out screwing Marilyn Monroe. This is progress folks. There is hope for democracy here.
Bruce went on to include some unkind remarks about Jackie Kennedy and found out that this was about the only line that even his audiences, who came expecting raunch and anger, would not let him cross. America loved her before and they felt sympathy for her now. She was off-limits.
Instead of making any public statement that might have implied she and her husband were now separated, Jacqueline Kennedy simply did what she had done during the first four and a half years in the White House. She quietly gathered up her things and her children and the support staff, and she left for the country. She would have had her press secretary Pamela Turnure explain it all away, except that it turned out that JFK had been having regular sexual relations with Turnure as well, and she had been given paid leave to find a new job. The young woman was hired by the office of Massachusetts Congressman Tip O’Neill and was ushered off to the relative safety of Capitol Hill. It was left to Jackie’s social secretary Liz Carpenter to explain that the First Lady’s absence was not that unusual.
Vice President Lyndon Johnson, sensing blood in the water, began raising his Washington profile, particularly hanging around the Senate, which was his right as the constitutional president of that body. What he was really doing, he told his own mistress, Madeline Brown, was “letting them know that this fox was in the henhouse.”
The Los Angeles District Attorney Evelle Younger said that his office would reexamine the supposed suicide of Marilyn Monroe in light of the FBI files that were recently disclosed. He went to great lengths to state that he was not accusing the Kennedys of any foul play but was simply exercising the oversight that voters had trusted him to use when they elected him in 1964, more than two years after his predecessor had closed Monroe’s case.
Although many, if not most, Americans were appalled at Kennedy’s affairs and his treatment of Jackie, he was now something he had never been before — an underdog. For reasons that psychologists had a field day with, his problems actually increased his support among a prime demographic — young men eighteen to thirty-four. A significant number of these men actually found something to admire in a President who could sleep with that many women, get away with it for so long, still have a beautiful wife and run the country at the same time.
Within the first twenty-four hours, however, the political elites in Washington, D.C. began quietly asking about impeachment. It was as if
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had written the position paper that could serve as the basis for the charges, or articles.