JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President

ALSO BY THURSTON CLARKE

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Copyright © Thurston Clarke, 2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clarke, Thurston.

JFK’s last hundred days : the transformation of a man and the emergence of a great president / Thurston Clarke.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-101-61780-9

1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917–1963. 2. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917–1963—Psychology. 3. Presidents—United States—Biography. 4. Political leadership—United States—Case studies. 5. Change (Psychology)—Case studies. 6. United States—Politics and government—1961–1963. I. Title.

E842.C55 2013

973.922092—dc23

[B]

2012047456

For Kathy Robbins and David Halpern

THE PORTRAIT

What makes journalism so fascinating
, and biography so interesting [is] the struggle to answer that single question: “What’s he like.”

—John F. Kennedy

E
laine de Kooning, a garrulous, promiscuous, hard-drinking Greenwich Village bohemian who had flirted with communism and championed the death-row inmate Caryl Chessman, came to the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach on the morning of December 31, 1962, to paint a portrait of President John F. Kennedy for the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. The artist William Walton, a close friend of the president and First Lady, had recommended her because he knew that Kennedy was too restless to tolerate a formal sitting and expected that de Kooning, who was known as “The Fastest Brush in the East,” could finish a portrait after a single session. After years of working in the shadow of her estranged husband, the famous abstract artist Willem de Kooning, she had earned a reputation as a figurative expressionist who could capture the essence of a subject in the vivid colors and bold brushstrokes of abstract art, and Walton and the Truman Library trustees were undoubtedly expecting a portrait like her celebrated take on the painter Robert De Niro, Sr. (father of the actor Robert De Niro), praised by one dealer as “
a stunning resemblance
that expresses so much character in a nearly abstract painting.”

She arrived to find Kennedy huddled on the patio with reporters and had trouble picking him out. She had expected, she said, the “
gray, sculptural
” man of the newspaper photographs. Instead, he was “incandescent, golden” and “bigger than life,” no taller than the other men, but inhabiting “a different dimension.” She had planned on making some quick sketches and finishing the portrait in the temporary studio she had established in an abandoned West Palm Beach theater. But after a morning with him, she decided he was too intriguing and changeable a subject for a single sitting to suffice and stayed four days. She perched on a ladder above him, sat on a stool opposite him, or stood at an easel,
watching as he nervously riffled through papers
, patted his hair, and crossed and uncrossed his legs. Phones rang; aides hurried across the flagstone patio; his son, John Jr., tossed pebbles into the swimming pool; and his daughter,
Caroline
, appeared and stood next to de Kooning with her own easel, sketching him until he came over and drew a cat on her pad.

De Kooning drew him sitting and standing, full face and in profile, arms akimbo or folded over his chest, wearing dark glasses or squinting into the sun. She was a handsome and lively woman whose wit was as quick as her brush. They joked, flirted, and he threw a leg over the arm of a chair, putting his crotch at the center of her sketch and asking, “
Is this pose all right
?”

“Well, it’s supposed to be an official portrait,” she said.

He smiled and held the pose.

She thought,
I’ll take what I get,
and kept working.

She papered the theater with sketches, charcoals, and watercolors, and worked late into the night. The more she drew him, the more he fascinated her, and frustrated her attempts to capture his essence in a single portrait. She began working on several canvases at once.
She was intrigued
by his “transparent ruddiness,” how his smile and frown both appeared “built-in to the bone,” “the curious faceted structure of light over his face and hair,” and the way this contributed to his “extraordinary variety of expressions.” She was mesmerized by his eyes—“incredible eyes with large violet irises half veiled by the jutting bone beneath his eyebrows”—and liked the way he instinctively assumed “the graceful positions of a college athlete.”
She told friends
she was “in love with his mind” and captivated “by the idea of such a gallant, intelligent, handsome man leading the country and the world.” She also admitted falling “a teeny little bit in love with him.”

She returned to New York with dozens of sketches and uncompleted portraits. Soon there were more. She realized that she had seen only one facet of him while his staff saw another, as did a public that saw him only on a two-dimensional television screen or in a photograph. She began sketching him when he appeared on television, and clipping his photographs from newspapers and magazines, tacking them to her walls and using them as models for more drawings and oils. Soon she was painting only him.

Walton visited her studio in early November 1963 to find photographs and sketches of Kennedy scattered across the floor, and the walls covered with so many of her studies that she had to climb a ladder to reach them all. Thirty-eight oils between two and eleven feet high and in various stages of completion leaned against walls and sat on easels.
He was larger than life and smaller
, youthful and athletic, mature and reserved, wearing a two-button suit or polo shirt, standing or sitting in the eye of a hurricane of vibrant colors.
After running out of space
, she had papered her living quarters with more sketches and photographs so that whenever she cooked, ate, took a bath, used the toilet, or made love, she saw him. A photograph shows her surrounded by photographs, drawings, and oils, as if trapped in a maze of mirrors reflecting and re-reflecting his image. It was testimony to the difficulty and vastness of the task she had assumed: capturing the essence of one of the most complicated and enigmatic men ever to occupy the White House.

The playwright Robert Sherwood once spoke of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “
heavily forested interior
.” Kennedy’s was, by comparison, the heart of the Amazon. His friend and groomsman Edmund Gullion spoke of “
a shrinking from ostentation or display
or for revealing himself or letting go with his emotions that doesn’t give the chronicler much to go on.”
Laura Bergquist of
Look
,
who understood him better than any other female reporter, believed that no one “knew the total of him” and called him the “prismatic president” because of the way he cultivated people to serve different needs and play different roles. When she asked, “What does it feel like to be president?” he had nervously rubbed his ankles, fingered his tie, jumped up from his rocking chair, and paced around the room before saying, “Let’s go on to another question. I’m not very good at that couch talk.”

Ted Sorensen, who had been his principal aide and speechwriter for ten years but seldom socialized with him, decided that “
different parts of his life
, works, and thoughts were seen by many people—but no one saw it all,” adding, “He sometimes obscured his motives and almost always shielded his emotions.” After observing him during the 1960 campaign, the author Norman Mailer concluded that his most characteristic quality was “
the remote and private air
of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others.” The journalist Charlie Bartlett, who had introduced him to Jackie, said flatly, “
No one ever knew John Kennedy
, not all of him.”

Because he compartmentalized his friends and family, parts of him remained hidden even to those who thought they knew him best. His brother Bobby was his attorney general and de facto assistant president, but when he and the former cabinet member Abraham Ribicoff went sailing off Palm Beach after Dallas, Ribicoff was shocked to find that he knew things about Jack that Bobby did not. The experience confirmed his sense that Kennedy was a “
very introverted man
” who had “kept a lot of things to himself,” and had “only exposed different facets of himself to different people.” He even bewildered Jackie, who called him “
a simple man
, yet so complex that he would frustrate anyone trying to understand him,” and “
a romantic
, although he didn’t like people to know that.” She concluded that “
to reveal yourself is difficult
and almost dangerous for people like that [the Kennedys]—I’d say Jack didn’t want to reveal himself at all.”

His fondness for secrecy contributed to his elusiveness.
He took French lessons
and swore his teacher to silence because he wanted to “surprise the world.”
He sent a friend abroad
as a clandestine emissary without informing the State Department, and
asked a neighbor
in Hyannis Port to run a parallel campaign organization, telling him to communicate via a post office box and coded address so that his secretary Evelyn Lincoln could give it to him directly, and “nobody else’s eyes will get to see it.”

His contradictory qualities were another barrier. He was a brass-knuckles politician and an idealist whose rhetoric encouraged nobility and sacrifice; a reckless driver but a cautious politician; a man who disliked close physical contact, even with his best friends, but who had a voracious sexual appetite. He was known for his wit and humanity, and for being chilly and remote. He gave the impression of being comfortable in his own skin, but he abhorred solitude. More than most presidents—more than most middle-aged men—he was a work in progress, a moving target for anyone trying to capture him on a canvas or in prose. The literary critic Alfred Kazin decided his most essential quality was “
that of the man who is always making
and remaking himself,” and called him “the final product of a fanatical job of self-remodeling.”

When Kennedy was a young man his father frequently told him, “
Can’t you get it into your head
that it’s not important what you really are? The only important thing is what people
think
you are!” He took this advice to heart, perhaps too much.
Mailer wondered
if his “elusive detachment” signified “the fortitude of a superior sensitivity or the detachment of a man who was not quite real to himself.”
Bergquist detected a vulnerability
and insecurity, “not simply because he was part of the upward-mobile Irish, but because I think he recognized himself as an image that had been manufactured. And the question came up: ‘Who loves me and wants me for myself, and who loves me for what they think I am, and what I can do?’”
While attempting to seduce
a young Pulitzer Prize–winning historian in 1953 he had leaped up from a sofa, grabbed her by the shoulders, and exclaimed, “I’m sad; I’m gay; I’m melancholy; I’m gloomy—I’m all mixed up, and don’t know how I am!”

De Kooning’s obsession may have bordered on madness, but her approach was sound. She understood that to discover the essence of a man who compartmentalized his life, you had to look into all his compartments, and to paint a portrait of a prismatic president, you had to view him through every prism. The following attempts to do with words what she was attempting with paints: to view John F. Kennedy through every prism and search through all his compartments during the crucial last hundred days of his life—days that saw him finally beginning to realize his potential as a man and a president—in order to solve the most tantalizing mystery of all: not who killed him, but who he
was
when he was killed, and where he would have led us.