An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (80 page)

Kennedy also must have taken comfort from the fact that he was able to hide his affair with Mary Meyer from Ben Bradlee. Bradlee said that he had “heard stories about how he had slept around in his bachelor days. . . . I heard people described as ‘one of Jack’s girlfriends’ from time to time. It was never topic A among my reporter friends, while he was a candidate. . . . In those days reporters did not feel compelled to conduct full FBI field investigations about a politician friend. My friends have always had trouble believing my innocence of his activities, especially after it was revealed that . . . Mary Meyer had been one of Kennedy’s girlfriends. So be it. I can only repeat my ignorance of Kennedy’s sex life, and state that I am appalled by the details that have emerged, appalled by the recklessness, by the subterfuge that must have been involved.”

If Kennedy had concerns about Jackie’s feelings, she helped him minimize them by discreetly avoiding a head-on clash with him over his womanizing. But she had no illusions about her husband’s behavior. At the end of their visit to Canada in 1961, while the president and Jackie were saying good-bye to people in a receiving line that included a “blonde bimbo,” as JFK’s military aide General Godfrey McHugh described her, Jackie “wheeled around in fury” and said in French to McHugh and Dave Powers standing behind her, “Isn’t it bad enough that you solicit this woman for my husband, but then you insult me by asking me to shake her hand!” One day, as she escorted a Paris journalist around the White House, she said to him in French, as they walked past “Fiddle,” “This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband.” Jackie seemed to have assumed that her remark would not shock a sophisticated Frenchman, but he said to one of Salinger’s aides, “What is going on here?”

Jackie’s pattern was similar to Rose’s denial of Joe’s affairs and her refusal to confront him. Jackie made a point of keeping Kennedy’s staff informed about her absences from and returns to the White House so that, as one naval aide put it, the president could get his “friends” out of the way. This is not to say that Jackie approved of her husband’s infidelity. It obviously made her angry and unhappy, but she chose to live with it.

Did potential whistle-blowers in the press put Kennedy in political jeopardy? He did not think so. In 1962, he continued to assume that while fringe newspapers and magazines might pick up on gossip about his sex life, the mainstream press would hold to traditional limits when discussing a president’s private behavior. He received some reassurance from a case involving one of his principal aides, a married man whose girlfriend had become pregnant. The press office received word that a reporter was going to ask Kennedy about the affair at a news conference. Kennedy took special care that day to call on only journalists he trusted, and the threat never materialized. Besides, as Salinger aide Barbara Gamarekian concluded, so many people in the press were sleeping around that for them to have gone after Kennedy would have been an act of embarrassing hypocrisy.

Kennedy also sent signals that the press should be careful. In February 1962
Time
did an article that referred to a
Gentlemen’s Quarterly
coverstory about the president. Kennedy called
Time
correspondent Hugh Sidey to the White House. “I never posed for any picture,” he berated Sidey. “Any President who would pose for
GQ
[a magazine allegedly with special appeal to homosexuals] would be out of his mind. . . . I’m not kidding,” Kennedy said menacingly. “I’m goddamn sick and tired of it. This is all a lie. . . . What are you trying to do to me? What do you think you’re doing?” Kennedy intimidated Sidey into promising a retraction.

Similarly, in May 1962, after a well-publicized forty-fifth-birthday party for JFK at Madison Square Garden, during which movie actress Marilyn Monroe entertained the president in a skin-tight, silver-sequined dress with a breathless rendering of “Happy Birthday,” rumors of a Kennedy-Monroe affair threatened to become an embarrassment to the White House. Kennedy enlisted a former New York reporter who was a member of his administration in a campaign to squelch the talk. He asked his aide to tell editors that he was speaking for the president and that stories about him and Marilyn simply were not true.

Kennedy also believed that reporters liked him and would be reluctant to embarrass him by publishing stories about his sex life. Of course, he understood that a president’s relations with the press are always to some degree adversarial. But throughout his political career and even more so when he began running for president, he made himself available to the press, and by so doing created subtle ties that reporters were loathe to undermine. At the 1956 convention, when Kennedy, in T-shirt and undershorts, began to leave his hotel bedroom to take a phone call in the sitting room, an aide said, “You can’t go out there in your shorts, there are reporters and photographers there.” “I know these fellows,” Kennedy replied loudly enough for them to hear. “They’re not going to take advantage of me.”

Kennedy’s wit and articulateness especially endeared him to those journalists who had soldiered through the Eisenhower years with a president who often left the press puzzling over what he had actually said or meant to say. Two taped TV specials on President’s Day that gave Americans an unprecedented view of Kennedy at work, and a February 1962 guided tour by Jackie of the executive mansion that described the restoration of the White House heightened media regard for the Kennedys and made it unlikely that reporters would debunk JFK’s attractive image as a family man.

Kennedy’s popularity with the press and public also partly rested on the glamour he and Jackie brought to the White House. Though most Americans did not think of themselves as connoisseurs of highbrow culture, they saw the president and First Lady as American aristocrats. Their stylish White House soirees—the president in white tie and tails and Mrs. Kennedy in the most fashionable of gowns—interest in the arts, and association with the best and the brightest at home and abroad made the country feel good about itself. To millions of Americans, under JFK the United States was reestablishing itself not only as the world’s premier power but also as the new center of progressive good taste, a nation with not only the highest standard of living but also a president and First Lady who compared favorably with sophisticated European aristocrats. However overdrawn some of this may have been, it was excellent politics for a Kennedy White House working to maintain its hold on the public imagination.

By contrast with the press and public, Kennedy was not so sure he could control the FBI. After Hoover made clear to Kennedy in March 1962 that he had information about Judith Campbell Exner’s ties to mob figures, Kennedy stopped seeing her. Nor apparently would he take her phone calls. Hoover did not, as Johnson told some reporters, have “Jack Kennedy by the balls.” Hoover was past retirement age, and his continuation in office depended on Kennedy’s goodwill. Still, Kennedy might have assumed that if Hoover was ready to call it quits, he would try to take him down before leaving.

Did Kennedy’s compulsive womanizing distract him from public business? Some historians think so, especially when it comes to Vietnam. Kennedy’s reluctance, however, to focus the sort of attention on Vietnam he gave to Berlin or other foreign and domestic concerns is not evidence of a distracted president, but of a determination to keep Vietnam from becoming more important to his administration than he wished it to be. Certainly, when one reviews Kennedy’s White House schedules, he does not seem to have been derelict about anything he considered a major problem. One can certainly argue that his judgment was imperfect about what should have been his highest priorities. A number of domestic matters received relatively less attention than foreign policy issues. But the supposition that he was too busy chasing women or satisfying his sexual passions to attend to important presidential business is not borne out by the record of his daily activities. And according to Richard Reeves, another Kennedy historian, the womanizing generally “took less time than tennis.” By the spring of 1962, after fifteen months in the White House, Kennedy had little reason to believe that his philandering was an impediment to his ability to govern and lead.

BY AUGUST 1961,
Heller and Federal Reserve chairman Martin had told Kennedy that the economy was in a vigorous recovery like those that had followed the two previous recessions in the fifties. Martin believed that the economy was in better shape than it had been for a long time and that the country could look forward to “a non-inflationary period of expansion and growth.” Holding down deficits and inflation now replaced talk of tax cuts as higher priorities.

Corporate views of Kennedy as a traditional “tax and spend” Democrat had made him eager to convince the business community that his administration was not “engaged upon a reckless program of [defense] spending beyond control and of artificially easy money.” In September 1961, he instructed Heller, budget director David Bell, and White House aide Fred Dutton to describe expanded spending on defense as fueling the recovery. He also asked them to rebut articles in
Reader’s Digest
and
Life
describing a large increase in welfare programs. The
Digest
’s assertion that his programs would cost taxpayers “18 billion dollars annually in a few years,” was, he stated, “wholly untrue and we ought to make him [the article’s author] eat it.”

Kennedy’s courting of business partly rested on doubts that the economy would hold up through the next presidential election. “On a number of occasions . . . you have expressed concern about the
duration
of the current business upswing,” the CEA told him in September. Kennedy wanted assurances that the economy would be “on the upgrade in the summer and fall of 1964.” Heller responded that to ensure against a recession then “would require action in 1962.” He saw the need for a bill promoting capital or infrastructure improvements and “a flexible tax proposal” triggering tax cuts. “Lord, that’s a tough one,” Kennedy replied. Kennedy feared that legislation requiring tax cuts in response to economic slowing would be seen as restricting congressional control over the economy or trampling on Congress’s “fiscal prerogatives.” Moreover, in the fall of 1961, Kennedy continued to worry that tax cuts would increase deficits and mark him out as a liberal Keynesian at odds with balanced budgets and fiscal conservatives.

Kennedy’s two greatest economic worries between September 1961 and June 1962 were the country’s balance-of-payment problems, which reduced the strength of the dollar, and inflation. With inflation running at only a little over 1 percent a year since 1958, most commentators were hard-pressed to understand Kennedy’s concern. But his worry, which the CEA shared, rested largely on the conviction that any sign of “upward price movements would tilt the Fed, the Treasury, and the conservatives in Congress against an expansionary fiscal policy and the reduction of unemployment.” As for balance-of-payment issues, the fear was that foreign holders of dollars might exercise their right to convert them into gold, causing a destabilizing drain on U.S. gold reserves and diminished confidence in the greenback. Sorensen recalled Kennedy’s near obsession with the issue: “‘I know everyone thinks I worry about this too much,’ he said to me one day as we pored over what seemed like the millionth report on the subject. ‘But if there is ever a run on the bank, and I have to devalue the dollar or bring home our troops, as the British did, I’m the one who will take the heat. Besides it’s a club that de Gaulle and all the others hang over my head. Any time there’s a crisis or a quarrel, they can cash in all their dollars and where are we?’”

Kennedy’s balance-of-payments concern was a case study in applying a lesson of the past inappropriately to a present dilemma. And the conviction that something had to be done about the problem presented, in Heller’s words, “a cruel dilemma.” Domestic economic expansion would increase imports and temporarily worsen the balance of payments. But checking the outflow of dollars by raising interest rates and taxes and cutting government expenditures would impede or stop the domestic recovery and increase unemployment. “The pressures to grasp the second horn of the dilemma,” Heller warned, “are going to be very strong. But we [at the CEA] urge you to resist them. We believe that it would be shortsighted folly to sacrifice the domestic economy for quick improvement in the balance of payments.”

Nevertheless, demands for action on the problem continued from Federal Reserve chairman Martin, Treasury officials, and Kennedy himself. At a meeting in late August, Martin described the balance of payments as the economic “cloud on the horizon,” and Dillon “agreed with Martin that we must be very careful to present a posture of responsibility in fiscal and financial affairs in order to keep our European friends from becoming jittery about the dollar.” It was apparent to those at this meeting that Kennedy was “greatly concerned about the future of the balance of payments and that this was the main economic problem that was really worrying both Dillon and the President.”

But despite his constant attention to the difficulty, requesting regular reports on estimated gold losses and discussing draconian reforms, Kennedy would not sacrifice domestic recovery for greater dollar stability. He signed on to several stopgap measures—increased foreign buying of military equipment, reduced reliance of U.S. agencies on overseas offices, mandatory use of American goods for foreign aid, more tourism to the United States, and systematic expansion of foreign trade—that helped reduce the loss of U.S. gold reserves from $1.977 billion to $459 million in the ten months after January 1961. But beyond joking that he might reduce the outflow of gold to France by keeping his father at home and encouraging his wife to see America first, that was all Kennedy would do until a more effective solution to the difficulty arrived with the Trade Expansion Act he put before Congress in his January 1962 State of the Union Message.