Camelot's Court

Robert Dallek

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780062065865
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Fifty years after John F. Kennedy's assassination, presidential historian Robert Dallek, whom The New York Times calls "Kennedy's leading biographer, " delivers a riveting new portrait of this president and his inner circle of advisors—their rivalries, personality clashes, and political battles. In Camelot's Court, Dallek analyzes the brain trust whose contributions to the successes and failures of Kennedy's administration—including the Bay of Pigs, civil rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam—were indelible.

Kennedy purposefully put together a dynamic team of advisors noted for their brilliance and acumen, including Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and trusted aides Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger. Yet the very traits these men shared also created sharp divisions. Far from being unified, this was an uneasy band of rivals whose ambitions and clashing beliefs ignited fiery internal debates.

Robert Dallek illuminates a president deeply determined to surround himself with the best and the brightest, who often found himself disappointed with their recommendations. The result, Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House, is a striking portrait of a leader whose wise resistance to pressure and adherence to principle offers a cautionary tale for our own time.

CHAPTER 1

John F. Kennedy: Prelude to a Presidency

Every presidency begins in a fog of uncertainty. The most ordinary of our chiefs, whose administrations left unremarkable legacies, never figured out how to make enduring contributions to the country. Even America’s three most notable White House occupants—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt—initially puzzled, respectively, over how to launch, preserve, and rescue the ship of state.

Small wonder then that at the start of his presidency John F. Kennedy struggled to fulfill amorphous promises to secure the country from foreign dangers, restore prosperity, and end bitter racial divisions threatening public tranquility. Above all, he feared a crisis that could bring the world to the brink of a nuclear war. It cast a shadow over the realization that he would be the responsible official deciding the fate of millions everywhere. What would he do? He had no clear idea. After he heard that historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wanted a White House appointment rather than an ambassadorship, Kennedy told him: “‘So, Arthur, I hear you are coming to the White House.’ ‘I am,’” Schlesinger replied. “‘What will I be doing there?’ ‘I don’t know,’” Kennedy responded. “‘I don’t know what I’ll be doing there, but you can bet we will both be busy more than eight hours a day.’”

Like Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War, Kennedy instinctively met the burdens of office with humor that he hoped would insulate him from the anguish of potentially catastrophic decisions. But fourteen years of political activism—running twice for the House and twice for the Senate—had also imbued him with instrumental cynicism. The objective in his presidential campaign, for example, had been not to describe how he would fix the country’s problems, but to win the election. He was following a well-developed tradition. The details of governing would have to come later.

Immediately after being elected, Kennedy was too tired to define how and where he would lead the nation. He was exhausted. His reach for the White House, which had begun in 1957 and consumed every waking hour during 1960, had drained his energies and left him ill-prepared for the arduous work ahead in the Oval Office. Health problems, including Addison’s disease—a possibly fatal malfunctioning of the adrenal gland—chronic back pain that had led to major unsuccessful surgeries, spastic colitis that triggered occasional bouts of diarrhea, prostatitis, urethritis, and allergies, had added greatly to the normal strains of a nationwide campaign.

But voters knew little about Kennedy’s lifelong illnesses, which had hospitalized him nine times for a total of forty-four days between 1955 and 1957. Only forty-three years old when he ran for the presidency, and masterful at giving the impression of youthful vigor, he had managed to mute questions about his capacity to meet the demands of governing. Yet during the campaign, political rivals had stirred suspicions about his health: Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, his principal challenger for the Democratic nomination, had encouraged journalists to inquire about his Addison’s disease, describing Kennedy to one reporter as “a little scrawny fellow with rickets.” Moreover, during the fall run against Republican Richard Nixon, break-ins of two Kennedy doctors’ New York offices suggest that, like the 1972 Watergate burglary, the Nixon campaign was trying to steal medical records that could decide the election outcome. When a medical bag containing Jack’s many medications went missing during the campaign, he was frantic to recover it—because of the political consequences rather than any threat to his health. “It would be murder,” he told a political ally, if it got into the wrong hands.

Responding to Kennedy’s frail appearance at a press conference the day after his election and unsubstantiated rumors about his health, a reporter asked whether talk about the president-elect’s questionable fitness was true. Kennedy dismissed the inquiry with a wave of his hand and assurance that he was in “excellent” shape. Yet Ted Sorensen, his principal Senate aide and speechwriter, recalled that Kennedy’s mind was neither “keen” nor “clear” two weeks after his election. He “still seemed tired then and reluctant to face up to the details of personnel and program selection.” Kennedy aides felt compelled to follow up with public declarations that he was in “superb physical condition,” assuring everyone that he was fully prepared to handle the demands of the presidency.

Kennedy echoed his doubts about satisfying the incessant demands from so many quarters with expressions of uncertainty about identifying and convincing the best people to serve in his cabinet and subcabinet. He told two of his aides: “For the last four years I spent so much time getting to know people who could help me get elected President that I didn’t have any time to get to know people who could help me, after I was elected, to be a good President.”

All thirty-five of Kennedy’s presidential predecessors could have made the same complaint: The road to the White House was so uncertain, especially for the handful who ascended to the job from the vice presidency upon a president’s death, that plans for how they would perform in office were never in the forefront of their thinking. Campaign rhetoric about managing current national and international problems was never more than that. Platforms and promises always told less about a president’s coming agenda than calculations about appealing to majority sentiment.

Kennedy’s route to the prize was as fortuitous as that of all who entered the office before him. True, his father’s dream of seeing one of his sons in the White House and having the financial resources to make it happen certainly made Kennedy’s ambitions more realizable than the presidential aspirations of men whose wealth and connections never matched his. Other conditions gave Jack an additional leg up. He was raised in a family that regularly breathed, talked, and consumed politics on a daily basis. His grandfathers were larger-than-life public figures who shadowed his early years and made him proud to be a Fitzgerald and a Kennedy. As important, their public visibility put a Kennedy entering Boston politics one step ahead of rivals.

Patrick Joseph Kennedy, Jack’s paternal grandfather, was an upwardly mobile Boston Irishman who made it big. Although P.J., as he was affectionately known, lived only until 1929, when Jack was twelve, his accomplishments and affluence were family lore. Forced to work on the Boston docks at the age of fourteen as a stevedore to help support his widowed mother and three older sisters, P.J. used savings to forge a business career as the owner of three taverns and a whiskey importing company that made him a leading figure in the city’s liquor trade. His standing as a successful East Boston businessman and a concern with the needs of the city’s Irish population drew him into a political career as a five-term member of the Massachusetts lower house and a two-term state senator. As a prominent Boston Democrat, he was a member of the state’s delegation to the 1884 national convention, where he gave a seconding speech for New York governor Grover Cleveland, the party’s presidential nominee. Giving up elective office in 1895, P.J. spent the rest of his life as one of Boston’s four principal Democratic Party ward bosses, choosing candidates for local and statewide offices and distributing patronage. As a part owner of a coal company and a bank, the Columbia Trust, P.J. established himself as one of the city’s principal power brokers and wealthier members of what was locally called the “cut glass” set, or FIFs, “First Irish Families.”

Jack’s maternal grandfather, John F. Fitzgerald, was even more prominent than P.J. and was more instrumental in drawing his grandson into politics. Honey Fitz, as his followers lovingly called him, entered the political arena at age twenty-two as a Customs House clerk and secretary to one of Boston’s leading Democratic bosses. He won his first election at age twenty-eight, in 1891 as a member of the Boston Common Council and simultaneously became ward boss of the North End when his mentor, the man he had been serving as secretary, died.

Fitz’s meteoric rise in local politics rested on a natural affinity for the calling. An affable, charming character, with the gift of gab described as Fitzblarney, he loved people and center stage. “Fitzie,” as the “dearos,” the name he gave to his devoted supporters, also called him, was celebrated in a verse extolling his political virtues: “Honey Fitz can talk you blind / on any subject you can find / Fish and fishing, motor boats / Railroads, streetcars, getting votes.” His oldest daughter said, “There was no one in the world like my father. Wherever he was, there was magic in the air.”

His personal appeal translated into repeated victories at the polls. In 1894, after two years as a state senator, he began a six-year run as Massachusetts’s only Democratic congressman and one of three Catholics in the House, where he established himself as the voice of an aggrieved Irish minority. The patrician Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge symbolized their sense of exclusion. Lodge’s haughty manner and demeanor reminded them of the saying that up in Boston, “the Lowells speak only to the Cabots and the Cabots speak only to God.” They delighted in the story of Fitzgerald’s rebuke of Lodge when the senator lectured Fitzgerald on the corrupting influence of immigrants: “Do you think the Jews or the Italians have any right in this country?” Lodge asked. “As much right as your father or mine. It was only a difference of a few ships,” Fitzgerald responded.

In 1905 Fitzgerald became Boston’s mayor, signaling the emergence of the city’s Irish as the principal political force and launching a personal dynasty lasting forty-five years. Although press stories about city hall corruption and rumors of an affair with Elizabeth “Toodles” Ryan, a beautiful cigarette girl at a local nightclub, marked his career as mayor, it little diminished Fitzie’s hold on his Irish constituents, who loved him and his antics as a defiance of the city’s imperious Brahmins. When Honey Fitz died at the age of eighty-seven in 1950, more than 3,500 people attended the church service. It impressed his grandson as a demonstration of “the extraordinary impact a politician can have on the emotions of ordinary people.”

No one, however, contributed more to Kennedy’s pre-presidential political career than his parents. His mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, was her father’s favorite child. Her status as an attractive Boston debutante closely identified with her ethnic and religious roots made her a favorite of the city’s aspiring Irish. They could imagine their sons and daughters sharing her rise to prominence that rivaled the standing of the town’s Protestant elite. Her marriage to P.J.’s son, Joseph P. Kennedy, a brilliantly successful banker, and her visibility as the mother of nine sons and daughters gave her children instant fame that could open the way to a potentially stunning public career.

It was her husband, Joe, however, who was the engine of the family’s special distinction that facilitated Jack’s rise to power. Joe’s middle name should have been ambition—for wealth, for status, for power. He grew up reading and identifying with the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches stories. Like so many other highly successful businessmen in his time, Joe enjoyed privileged beginnings. His family’s economic and social standing gave him access to Boston Latin, the city’s most famous public school, attended by its wealthiest residents. Despite an undistinguished academic record, Joe’s athletic accomplishments on the baseball team, success as the captain of the drill team, and social skills that fostered his election as senior class president won him admission to Harvard College, where, again, he made a mark not as an outstanding student but as a budding politician and entrepreneur. He won election to student councils and the storied Hasty Pudding Club while also running a tour bus business that paid most of his college expenses and gave him a feel for moneymaking, which became his dominant focus after earning his B.A. in 1912.

Over the next twenty years, his talent for building successful businesses in banking, liquor, movies, stocks, and real estate made him one of the richest and most prominent men in America. Joe and his family, which had grown to nine children by 1932, enjoyed a standing that was the envy of the country’s most famous figures—whether in Hollywood, sports, or politics. The onset of the Great Depression in the thirties convinced Joe, as he told his four sons, that the next generation of big men in America would not be in business, as when he came of age, but in government. And this is where Joe began investing his energies, and he expected Joseph, Jr., John, Robert, and Edward to do the same.

In 1934, Joe’s financial contributions to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential campaign and reputation as a brilliant entrepreneur facilitated his appointment as chairman of the new Securities and Exchange Commission. Joe had been eager for a cabinet post, but public anger toward big business in the Depression precluded giving someone like Joe, who had a reputation for questionable financial dealings, a White House job. When asked why he had chosen a Wall Street insider to head the SEC, Roosevelt replied, “It would take a thief to catch a thief.” In 1937, the president appointed Joe to head the new Maritime Commission, where he could draw on his World War I experience in shipbuilding to spur the growth of an American merchant fleet that FDR believed essential to the country’s economic future and national defense in a likely European war.

Joe’s reach for high public office culminated in a 1938 appointment as ambassador to Great Britain. Kennedy having established a reputation as an effective and evenhanded administrator at both the SEC and Maritime Commission, Roosevelt suggested he consider becoming secretary of commerce. But Joe saw the Court of St. James’s, the most prestigious overseas diplomatic assignment, as better suited to his goals. He had thoughts of running for president, and a term as ambassador to Great Britain would school him in foreign affairs and supplement his credentials as a brilliantly successful businessman. White House insider Tommy Corcoran told Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who puzzled over Kennedy’s choice of London over an appointment to Roosevelt’s cabinet, that the ambassadorship would open all doors to him. It wasn’t just political ambition driving Kennedy’s decision, Corcoran believed, but the chance to become America’s first Irish Catholic ambassador to London. It gave him equal status with the country’s most prominent Protestants.

FDR hoped that Kennedy’s Irish roots would make him a critical observer of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s conservative government and, specifically, his appeasement policy toward Hitler’s Germany. As Kennedy was about to leave for London, Roosevelt privately described his selection of Kennedy as “a great joke, the greatest joke in the world,” meaning that the British government would not be able to co-opt the Irishman, whom Roosevelt expected to make U.S. antagonism to Adolf Hitler clear. But Kennedy disappointed FDR’s expectations. Wedded to American isolationist thinking and fearing a European war that could draw the United States into the fighting and risk the lives of his two oldest sons, Kennedy supported Chamberlain’s soft line toward the Nazis and lobbied FDR to do the same.

Roosevelt, however, wanted no part of the disastrous Chamberlain-Kennedy indulgence of German aggression, which he saw threatening democratic nations everywhere. He shared Winston Churchill’s observation that Chamberlain had a choice between dishonor and war. He chose dishonor and got war. “Who would have thought that the English could take into camp a red-headed Irishman?” Roosevelt said. The great majority of Americans shared FDR’s outlook, and Kennedy’s reputation as an appeaser and a closet anti-Semite partial to Hitler’s persecution of Germany’s Jews decisively ended his ambitions for high elective office.

The fall in public standing depressed Kennedy, and he began taking “solace . . . in his children’s accomplishments.” Kennedy shifted the focus of his political ambitions to his oldest son, Joe, Jr. And the young man was all too eager to meet his father’s expectations. Like Joe, Sr., junior distinguished himself in prep school at Choate and at Harvard as an athlete and a young man on the make. In 1940, he entered Harvard Law School and simultaneously won election to the Massachusetts delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where he favored party boss James Farley over FDR’s ambition for a third term. In May 1941, after completing his second year in law school, Joe, anticipating U.S. involvement in the European war, which had begun in September 1939, enlisted in the Navy, winning wings as a naval aviator in May 1942. His commitment to military service rested on genuine concern about the nation’s security but also on the conviction that a military record would be essential to anyone intent on a postwar political career.

Joe’s hopes for his oldest son, who, in his twenties, already seemed marked out for extraordinary achievements by his ambition, family connections, and widely acknowledged charm, like that of Honey Fitz, collapsed in August 1944. Stationed in England, Joe volunteered for a risky mission aimed at German launch sites for their V-1 rockets on the coast of Belgium. The unmanned “buzz bombs,” as they were called, were devastating London. Joe and one other Navy airman flew a PB4Y Liberator bomber armed with twenty-two thousand pounds of explosives, the largest concentration of dynamite on a plane prior to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Joe and his copilot were to bail out before crossing the English Channel, and the plane would continue to the target by remote control. But the plane, for unexplained reasons at the time, exploded while they were still aboard, killing both of them. In 2001, fifty-seven years after the accident, a World War II member of the British corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers explained that a failure to inform British authorities to turn off ground-based radars in the south of England “upset the delicate radio controls” on Joe’s plane and triggered the explosion.

Joe’s death devastated his father, who told a friend, “You know how much I had tied my whole life up to his and what great things I saw in the future for him.” To another friend, he said, “all my plans for my own future were all tied up with young Joe and that has gone to smash.” Losing a child is torment enough for anyone, but for Joe it also meant the suspension of his dreams for a Kennedy in the highest reaches of American political power.

But not for long: In 1946, John, the second son, became the reluctant heir to Joe’s political ambitions. Jack, as his family and friends called him, was less outgoing and more cerebral than his older brother. As a boy, his health problems compelled long stretches in bed or at least indoors: Three months before his third birthday, he had scarlet fever, a life-threatening disease in 1920 that hospitalized him for two months, followed by two weeks in a Maine sanatorium. He subsequently contracted all the illnesses—bronchitis, chicken pox, ear infections, German measles, measles, mumps, and whooping cough—that commonly afflicted school-age children and caused periods of isolation that he filled with reading adventure stories—everything from Sinbad the Sailor to King Arthur and the Round Table.

Other illnesses followed: At Choate, the exclusive Connecticut private school, which Jack began attending in 1931, when he was fourteen, he suffered from spastic colitis, an intestinal disorder that kept him from gaining weight and forced his hospitalization in 1933. He responded to his illness with a kind of wry humor that masked fears of a bleak future. He wrote his closest friend at Choate: “It seems that I was much sicker than I thought I was, and am supposed to be dead, so I am developing a limp and a hollow cough.”

In June 1934, when Jack was seventeen, Joe sent him to the Mayo Brothers’ clinic in Minnesota, where he spent a month while the doctors struggled to come up with a treatment for his intestinal malady. He wrote his schoolmate: “God what a beating I’m taking. I’ve lost 8 pounds and still going down. . . . Nobody able to figure what’s wrong with me. All they do is talk about what an interesting case.” They also su...