JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (8 page)

August 15–31, 1963

DAYS 100–84

WASHINGTON

E
isenhower began honoring
his part of the Sherman Adams bargain while Kennedy was flying back to Washington. After the
United States
docked in New York, he announced at a press conference that although he would not reach a final conclusion about the test ban treaty before studying its full text, “Unless there is . . . some rather hard evidence that the Soviets are way ahead of us in something, or that the security of the United States would be endangered, then I would certainly be on the favorable side.” A frontpage headline in the
New York Times
the next day declared, “Eisenhower Hints He Backs Treaty,” and it was later reported that
he had sent Senator Fulbright
a letter formally announcing his support for the treaty.

Minutes after arriving at the White House, Kennedy met with Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the former political rival he had appointed ambassador to South Vietnam. Lodge’s decision to accept the post struck many as just as inexplicable as Kennedy’s decision to offer it to him. It was not a first-rank embassy, certainly not for a distinguished sixty-one-year-old former U.S. senator, ambassador to the United Nations, and vice presidential candidate. Soon after the inauguration, Lodge had told Secretary of State Rusk that he had “one more tour of public duty in his system” and would accept a “challenging” position in the administration. Two years later, Kennedy ran into Lodge at a dinner and afterward instructed his military attaché, Major General Chester Clifton, to ask him if he was interested in an embassy.
Lodge told Clifton
that although he was not looking for a job, he would consider something “challenging and difficult.” Clifton relayed this to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who recommended Saigon.

After Lodge accepted the post,
he received a condescending letter
from the Republican congresswoman Frances Bolton, a prominent member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, informing him that she and many Republicans were “deeply disturbed” by his decision. If South Vietnam fell to the Communists during his tenure, she wrote, the GOP would share the blame, and she believed that Kennedy was “perfectly capable of using a possible defeat in Southeast Asia to ruin the Republican Party.” Was Lodge certain he understood “the complexities of these countries,” she asked, and certain of his “capacity for patience, understanding, and really infinite wisdom?” Lodge replied, “
American security must always be considered
from a totally unpartisan viewpoint, without regard to party politics, important though party politics are.” South Vietnam was vital to U.S. security, the commander in chief had asked him to serve, and under these circumstances, “service is a patriotic duty as well as an honor”—a stirring defense all the more impressive for being voiced in a private communication.

Kennedy’s motives for sending Lodge to Saigon were less estimable. His first choice had been Edmund Gullion, the current ambassador to Ghana and a friend and usher at his wedding who had frequently advised him about foreign affairs. Rusk argued that the post called for someone with more experience and seniority and pushed for Lodge. Kennedy’s other advisers opposed sending a Republican of his stature to Saigon on the grounds that he might resist taking orders from a Democratic administration and prove difficult to fire.
Bobby warned him that in about six months
they might find him causing a lot of trouble. (In fact, he began causing trouble in less than a week.)
Sorensen
thought Lodge “lacked the qualities of prudence which were necessary in this kind of area,” and joked that he hoped he was being sent to North Vietnam. O’Donnell was shocked because Kennedy had often disparaged his political skills and dismissed him as lazy. Schlesinger suggested that appointing him might have appealed to the president’s “
instinct for magnanimity
.” But had he really wanted to be magnanimous he could have offered him a more prestigious post, and Schlesinger conceded that “
involving a leading Republican
in the Vietnam mess appealed to his instinct for politics.” O’Donnell and Jackie arrived at a similar conclusion, with O’Donnell saying, “
The idea of getting Lodge mixed up
in such a hopeless mess as the one in Vietnam was irresistible,” and Jackie remarking later that he believed sending a Republican to Saigon “might be such a brilliant thing to do because Vietnam was rather hopeless.”

Kennedy certainly had reason to be magnanimous. His victories over Lodge in the Massachusetts Senate race in 1952 and in the 1960 general election, when Lodge had run for vice president, had capped a family rivalry spanning generations.
It had started when Lodge’s grandfather
Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., had introduced a bill in Congress in 1895 aimed at curbing immigration from southern and eastern Europe by requiring immigrants to be literate in their national languages. When his bill reached the House, Kennedy’s maternal grandfather, who was then a congressman, had fiercely opposed it. According to a story that Fitzgerald told for years and his grandson surely knew by heart, when he and Lodge met in the Senate chamber, Lodge had called him an “impudent young man” and asked, “Do you think the Jews or the Italians have any right in this country?” Fitzgerald had shot back, “As much right as your father or mine. It was only a difference of a few ships.” Fitzgerald ran against Lodge for the Senate in 1916 and lost. In 1952, his grandson challenged Lodge’s grandson for the same seat and won. Lodge served as Eisenhower’s ambassador to the United Nations until he resigned to run for vice president in 1960, and lost to Kennedy again. Two years later, Ted Kennedy beat Lodge’s son in an election to fill the president’s former Senate seat.

The reporter Joe McCarthy had interviewed Kennedy and his father as they cruised off Hyannis Port in 1959. As Jack listened, his father thundered that he had moved his family out of Boston because the anti-Catholic, anti-Irish prejudice of the Yankee elite made it no place to raise Irish-Catholic children. “
I didn’t want them to go through
what I had to go through when I was growing up there,” he told McCarthy, adding, “They wouldn’t have asked my daughters to join their deb clubs; not that the girls would have joined anyway—they never gave two cents for that society stuff. But the point is they wouldn’t have been asked in Boston.” Kennedy had enjoyed more social success than his father, attending Choate, an elite prep school, and becoming the first Irish Catholic to join Harvard’s Spee Club. But he remained convinced that the WASP elite was determined to exclude him from its private clubs. While playing golf at the Newport Country Club before his wedding, he had been reprimanded because his foursome did not include a member. “
I’m afraid that they feel
their worst fears are being realized,” he told his friends, “the invasion by the Irish-Catholic hordes into one of the last strongholds of America’s socially elite.”

The presidency did not knock the chip off his shoulder.
The Irish ambassador
to Washington, Thomas Kiernan, was surprised by his frequent references to the legendary (and perhaps imaginary) “No Irish Need Apply” signs in Boston, and he once told Paul Fay, “
Do you know it is impossible
for an Irish Catholic to get into the Somerset Club in Boston? If I moved back to Boston even after being President, it would make no difference.”
He told the columnist Betty Beale
that his family was the only Gentile one in the Palm Beach Country Club because it was the only club they could join, and Beale noticed that he seemed upset because he remained on the waiting list to join Washington’s Cosmos Club, although it customarily admitted presidents upon their election. After reading a critical letter in the
New York Times
signed by a man with a Protestant name and a Westchester County address, he remarked to an aide that WASPs seemed to think that “
the world should be made
in their image.” After it came out that Ted Kennedy had cheated on a Harvard examination, he said, “
It won’t go over with the WASPs
. They take a very dim view of looking over your shoulder at someone else’s exam paper. They go in more for stealing from stockholders and banks.”

How, then, could he look at Lodge and
not
see the kind of Brahmin who had driven his father from Boston, and would have blackballed an Irish American president from the Somerset Club? Ken O’Donnell, an expert on the dimensions of the Kennedy chip, believed that he “
nursed an Irish distaste
for the aloof North Shore Republican [Lodge],” and remembered that after seeing him join Nixon on the dais at the 1960 GOP convention, he had said, “
That’s the last Nixon will see
of Lodge. If Nixon ever tries to visit the Lodges in Beverly, they won’t let him in the door,” a comment raising the question of how warm a welcome
he
would have received on the Lodge doorstep. When Bobby Kennedy was asked if his brother had held Lodge in “high regard,” he replied carefully, “
I think a fair regard
.”

•   •   •

T
HE
OFFICIAL
PHOTOGRAPH
OF
the August 15 meeting between Kennedy and Lodge shows Kennedy leaning back in his rocking chair while Lodge sits perched on the edge of a couch, hands clasped between his knees like a schoolboy summoned to the principal’s office. Here they were, then, inches apart, the last Yankee Brahmin to have a distinguished political career, and the first Irish Brahmin to become president. Ignore for a moment that when Kennedy was a boy his family had moved to New York to escape the snobbery of Brahmins like the Lodges, and that when Lodge was of a similar age he moved with his widowed mother to Paris, where the novelist Edith Wharton (“
a most loyal and devoted friend
to both my father and mother,” according to Lodge) took them under her wing. And ignore that Lodge’s father had been a poet and a favorite of President Theodore Roosevelt, who described him in a letter that Lodge quoted as “
the only man I have ever met
who, I feel, was a genius,” and that after an acrimonious meeting with Joe Kennedy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had told his wife, “
I never want to see
that man again as long as I live.” Ignore all the differences of religion, class, and upbringing, and you have two men with more in common than either suspected or cared to acknowledge.

Lodge had lost his father when he was seven, an event leaving him absorbed with his health and, like Kennedy, a careful eater, devotee of bland soups, and afternoon napper. Both had followed mediocre prep school careers with success at Harvard. Lodge had been thirty-four when he won his Senate seat, Kennedy thirty-five, and both were criticized for being young men in a hurry. Both won medals for valor and ran on their war records—Kennedy for the House, and Lodge to regain the Senate seat he had resigned to fight in the war. Kennedy had dabbled in journalism and considered making it a career; Lodge had spent nine years at newspapers in Boston and New York. Both were appalled by baby-kissing, arms-in-the-air politics. When David Halberstam of the
New York Times
wrote about Lodge, “
He is a total politician
in the best sense. That is, he is attuned to the needs, ambitions, and motivations of others. Yet his background, coolness, and reserve mark him as essentially different from other, more genial and back-slapping politicians,” he could have been describing Kennedy. Both were also considered liberals, although Kennedy was uncomfortable with the label and Lodge the more progressive of the two. Lodge had written in the
Atlantic Monthly
in 1953, “
In becoming a Republican
, I thought I was joining something affirmative, evolutionary, and idealistic—which demanded sacrifice and generosity—not a party which said no to all proposals for change.”
He had introduced a bill
in the Senate requiring public funding of presidential campaigns “to the exclusion of all other methods of financing,” accused the GOP of becoming a “
rich man’s club
” and a “haven for reactionaries,” and blindsided Nixon during the campaign by announcing that a Nixon-Lodge administration would appoint the first Negro to a cabinet post. Despite all this, the aristocratic Lodge never connected with ordinary voters, while Kennedy, in the words of one friend, could “
loft a pass, swap a joke
, hoist a beer, hurt his back and hug his kids like millions of other Americans.”

The button activating the secret Oval Office microphone was concealed somewhere on the round mahogany coffee table. The August 15 photograph shows wires running from the base of this table into the floor. One led from the microphone to the basement tape recorder, although a visitor would assume that they were all telephone wires. In fact, Kennedy was concealing more than a hidden microphone from Lodge. Had Lodge known that he doubted that the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem could defeat the Communist insurgency, and was considering how and when to extricate the more than sixteen thousand U.S. military advisers currently serving in South Vietnam, he might have paid more attention to Congresswoman Bolton’s warning.

•   •   •

K
ENNEDY
AND
HIS
BROTHER
B
OBBY
had stopped in Vietnam in 1951 during a private fact-finding tour of the Middle East and Asia. They arrived at a violent juncture in the struggle between the French colonial authorities and Viet Minh guerrillas led by Ho Chi Minh. A suicide bomber had killed a French general, antigrenade nets covered government ministries, and artillery flashes lit the horizon as they dined at a rooftop restaurant in Saigon with Edmund Gullion, then serving as the political counselor at the embassy. Kennedy asked Gullion what he had learned. “
That in twenty years
there will be no more colonies,” Gullion said. “We’re going nowhere out here. The French have lost. If we come in here and do the same thing we will lose, too, for the same reason. There’s no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. The home front is lost. The same thing would happen to us.” Gullion believed that the only way to defeat the Viet Minh was by encouraging a strong and countervailing nationalism among the South Vietnamese, an impossible strategy for a colonial power.