Kennedy: The Classic Biography (6 page)

Least important were the outward changes. He became handsomer as he grew grayer, the full face and broad shoulders of maturity providing a more striking and appealing presence than the earlier, more slender boyishness. He looked much older in person than he did on television or in photographs, but that was always true. He still looked younger than his years. His face became more lined, but the ready smile, the thoughtful eyes and the lack of affectation all remained. He had his hair cut (by the same House Office Building barber, whatever his office) a little less fully in later years, but it was always thicker than anyone else’s. In fact, when chided by staff members on the regular scalp massages a succession of secretaries were trained to give him—a habit acquired from his father—he observed that he was the only one in the room who received such special hair treatment “and the only one with all his hair.”

His clothes continued to be expensive but always conservative and—once he became a Senator and a married man—always neat. In his office he rarely worked in his shirt sleeves and never with his tie loosened, though he would sometimes jerk out the tail of his monogrammed shirt to clean the glasses he occasionally wore for reading. From time to time he would try wearing a hat or a vest to lessen talk about his youth, but it never lasted. And he never tried to appear more “folksy” by wearing, in either work or play, an informal bow tie, a gaudy shirt, a light-colored or odd-colored suit or a multicolored handkerchief in his breast pocket. He changed clothes frequently and knew his large wardrobe intimately. When I needed a necktie in the midst of the campaign, Dave Powers handed me one he was sure the Senator never wore. But the candidate’s first words on entering the room were: “Is that my tie you’re wearing?”

His speaking changed. Except for an occasional “Cubar” and “vigah,” his Boston-Harvard accent became less pronounced, though still noticeable. His self-confidence on the platform grew, and his ability to read—and, at the right time, to discard—a prepared text increased. The Congressman and freshman Senator whose private conversations were always informed and articulate but whose public speeches were rarely inspired or inspiring became the candidate and President whose addresses stirred the hearts of the world. While his spelling also improved, his handwriting became even worse.

These outward changes over the years were pale in comparison to the more profound changes in his personality and philosophy.

He became less shy and more poised in his public appearances. The youthful aspirant for Congress who had reluctantly toured taverns and textile mills in search of Massachusetts voters—who even as a Presidential hopeful felt he might impose upon, or be rejected by, each new group of voters—became in time the President who welcomed every opportunity to get away from his desk and get back to the people. While most of the shyness in public disappeared, a well-bred deference in private did not. No one was ever addressed as “fellow,” “son,” “old man” or “old boy.” The wives of his associates were always addressed as “Mrs.,” and most office-holders, particularly his elders, by their titles, or as “Mr.” He became, if not less demanding of his staff, at least more apologetic about disrupting their lives and schedules, and the same was true of the general public. In 1953, as he parked his car in front of a “No Parking” sign in downtown Washington, he smilingly told me, “This is what Hamlet means by‘the insolence of office.’” But little more than ten years later, in November, 1963, he insisted in New York on dismissing the usual Presidential police escort on his ride from the airport to the city, accepting the delays of traffic and traffic lights because of the inconvenience his rush-hour arrival would otherwise create for New Yorkers.

Though his mind had more and more with which to be preoccupied, he became less absent-minded and better organized, with an amazing ability to compartmentalize different dates and duties. Even as his schedule tightened and his burdens grew, he acquired more respect for punctuality. He was still always in a hurry and often behind in his appointments, but he less often kept other officials waiting unnecessarily, or asked airlines to hold their flights, or drove dangerously fast on public highways. In his last-minute dashes to the airport during the early Senate days, he would take me along to talk business as he drove, and an aide, “Muggsy” O’Leary, to handle parking and luggage. Muggsy refused the front seat on these high-speed trips, calling it the “death seat,” and I acceded to Muggsy’s preference only for fear that, if I were in the back seat, the Senator would turn around as he drove.

He also grew more accustomed to disappointment in his plans and to criticism in print. In 1954 he was deeply disturbed by Boston Post editorials accusing him of “sacrificing the best interests of the people who elected him.” But in 1963 when right-wing author Victor Lasky printed out of context every unfavorable rumor or report that could be collected about the Kennedys under the title of JFK:
The Man and the Myth
,JFK dismissed both book and author as more pitifully ridiculous than dangerous.

The fact that Lasky and other critics could discover inconsistencies between his Congressional, Senatorial and Presidential positions did not surprise or dismay him. “We all learn,” he observed in 1960, “from the time you are born to the time you die…. Events change…conditions change, and…you would be extremely unwise…to pursue policies that are unsuccessful.”

He did not feel bound for life by his views as a Boston Congressman on the promotion of farm Income, for example, or the expansion of world trade. When a Republican Congressman in 1961 quoted against him a fiery speech of 1949 in which Congressman Kennedy had criticized the Truman China policy, President Kennedy, though not retreating from the thrust of his earlier policy view, had no hesitation in stating to questioning newsmen, “In my speech in 1949 I placed more emphasis on personalities than I would today….I would say that my view today is more in accordance with the facts than my view in 1949.”

Clearly in later years he was more liberal than he had been as a young Congressman who had, in his words, “just come out of my father’s house.” He still refused to think with accepted stereotypes or to talk with sweeping generalities or to act with dogmatic solutions. He still refused to embrace change for the sake of change or to oppose compromise when compromise was required. But he cared more about ideas and ideals where once he had cared chiefly about winning. He had talked to me with concern but calm in our first meeting about the statistics of unemployment in Lawrence, Massachusetts. But as we drove through West Virginia in 1960, he climbed back into the car after a visit to a jobless miner’s shack visibly moved. He shook his head in dismay and said nothing. Unlike those liberals who start out with all the answers, he had started out asking questions. And more than most “self-made” men, the deep convictions he had developed were not inherited from his parents or imposed by his environment but were instead the product of his own reasoning and learning.

In the early stages of his public career his foreign policy speeches had a militant ring. Defense, in his view, was the bulk of diplomacy and disarmament was only a dream. But with increased perspective and responsibility came a renewed commitment to peace. Nothing gave him greater satisfaction in the White House than signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

The Senator who in 1954 paid little attention to the historic Supreme Court desegregation decision became less than a decade later the first President in history to invoke all the executive, legislative and moral powers of his office on behalf of equal rights.

The young Congressman who voted for the McCarran Internal Security Act, and who was—by his own admission—insufficiently sensitive to the ruin of reputations by McCarthyism, became the President who awarded the Enrico Fermi prize to the much abused J. Robert Oppen-heimer, pardoned Communist leader Junius Scales, halted the postal interception of Communist propaganda, welcomed the controversial Linus Pauling into the White House, and appointed to his administration several of McCarthy’s favorite targets.

In 1953 he knew little and cared less about agriculture, conservation and natural resources. His views on basic economic, fiscal and monetary policies were either unformed or uninformed. He had seen comparatively little of his own country, its land and its inhabitants. He had never toured a mining town or viewed a cotton field or visited a national forest. He had never, as he later admitted in a Farm Belt speech, “plowed a furrow, straight or crooked.”

But by 1961 it could be said that no President had ever seen so often and known so well the people and the problems of every part of the country. During the preconvention campaign days, after a rainy day inspection of a farm near Columbus, Nebraska, he told his luncheon audience that the town banker had informed him of the bank’s basic rule: Lend no money to a man who’s never had mud on his face and manure on his shoes. “Today,” said the Senator from Boston, “I can qualify for a loan.”

He was fully aware of his own growth and evolution. He was, in fact, disappointed that the Burns biography of 1959 had not emphasized “a far greater evolution than he suggests. He could contrast my indifferent record at school with my present intensity.” The Senator candidly compared his political development with his scholastic performance. “The fact of the matter is,” he told me, “that I fiddled around at Choate and really didn’t become interested until the end of my sophomore year at Harvard.”

Some might say that he fiddled around as a Congressman and really didn’t become interested until his sophomore year in the Senate. It seemed to me in 1953 that an inner struggle was being waged for the spirit of John Kennedy—a struggle between the political dilettante and the statesman, between the lure of luxury and lawmaking. His performance in the House of Representatives had been considered by most observers to be largely undistinguished—except for a record of absenteeism which had been heightened by indifference as well as ill health and by unofficial as well as official travels.

Having won a Senate seat and a satisfactory measure of glory, he had proved his worth in his chosen profession of politics. It was six years until re-election, and the responsibilities of a freshman Democratic Senator under a Republican Congress and administration were neither weighty nor exciting. Having borne more pain and gloom than he liked to remember, he enjoyed in his bachelor days carefree parties and companions on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. There was a natural temptation to spend the limited number of days in which he could count on enjoying full health in pursuit of pleasure as well as duty.

But gradually the statesman won out, as his convictions deepened, his concerns broadened and Washington and the world occupied more and more of his time. And as clear as the fact of John Kennedy’s extraordinary growth is the fact that many factors contributed to it: his reading, his traveling, and the widening scope of his associates, experiences and responsibilities.

In 1952 he was elected to the United States Senate, broadening his concerns as well as his constituency.

In 1953 he was married, ending the carefree life of the bachelor and establishing a home of his own.

In 1954 a spinal operation brought him close to death, and the long months of immobile recuperation were spent in sober reflection.

In 1955 he learned, as he researched and wrote a book, about the essence of democracy, the public office-holder’s relations with his public.

In 1956 he narrowly missed the Vice Presidential nomination of his party, emerging as a national figure in wide demand.

In 1957-1959 he crisscrossed the country constantly, campaigning in areas wholly unlike his own, observing as well as orating, learning as well as teaching.

In 1960 he was successively Presidential candidate, Presidential nominee and President-elect, and the increased horizons and responsibilities of each role increased the breadth and depth of his perception.

In 1961 the Presidency altered his outlook and insight even more.

Fortunately, however, the gaiety and laughter within him never subsided. As Senator and President, in his home or on a boat, in the pool or private quarters of the White House, and particularly at Cape Cod and Palm Beach, he was always able to relax as intensively as he worked, to catch up on his sleep or his sun or his golf, and to laugh at his children and the world and himself.

Nor did he, in his moments of utmost pride and solemnity, ever pretend to be free from human vices and imperfections; and he would not want me to so record him. Like Lincoln’s a hundred years earlier, his language and humor could be as coarse in private conversation as they were correct on the public platform. He followed Franklin’s advice of “early to bed, early to rise” only when he could not otherwise arrange his schedule.

He had no passion for cards, dice or professional gambling—he never played poker, tried bridge only briefly and grew bored with backgammon—but he would briefly try his luck on campaign stops at Las Vegas, liked to bet on his golf games and did consistently well in our office World Series betting pools. Attending a Boston Red Sox game with aide Dave Powers, a baseball statistician without peer, he asked Powers how often slugger Ted Williams hit a home run, and Powers immediately calculated “one out of every fifteen times at bat.” “All right,” said Kennedy, “I’ll bet you ten dollars to one he doesn’t hit one this time.” Powers accepted the bet—Williams hit a home run—and Kennedy, who would later defy all the odds in politics, was more careful thereafter not to challenge them in baseball against Powers.

In eleven years I did not see him smoke a total of eleven cigarettes, but with increasing frequency he enjoyed an expensive cigar after a meal or during a conference. (His decision as President to exclude Cuban tobacco was clearly a “sacrifice” for him.)

Along with the vast quantities of milk he usually drank with his campaign plane meals, he sometimes liked a bottle of beer. He had, in fact, revealed the drinking of a bottle of beer or two when his father was about to present him with the thousand-dollar check given to all Kennedy boys who did not smoke or drink before the age of twenty-one. When relaxing, he enjoyed a daiquiri, a scotch and water or a vodka and tomato juice before dinner and a brandy stinger afterward. He rarely drank in any quantity, and it rarely had any detectable effect on him. But he once told me with some gusto of his rather flippant remarks to a pompous couple one night in the West Indies when too much sun and rum had dissolved his customary reserve.