If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy by Jeff Greenfield

Author:Jeff Greenfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

A DIFFERENT COUNTRY—BUT HOW DIFFERENT?

It was March 8, 1965, and the President of the United States was in a lousy mood.

Some of it could be chalked up to the weather. It was a gray, drizzly day, and the evening promised to be no better . . . which meant that the Potomac cruise on the Honey Fitz with a few close friends would be a chill, gloomy affair, even if the weather didn’t turn foul enough to call the whole thing off.

Some of it was a matter of health and well-being. The ills that had plagued him all his life were back with a vengeance; when he wasn’t in pain, he was still weakened by the afflictions of his body. Even worse, his wife and his brother had effectively walled him off from Dr. Max Jacobson, whose injections had been a source of instant energy. As for well-being, for more than a year and a half, since the death of his infant son Patrick and the shooting at Dallas, he’d completely curbed the impulses of a lifetime . . . well, almost totally . . . but he could sense those impulses returning. He’d once told Harold Macmillan that three days without a woman left him with headaches. By now I should be suffering from terminal migraines, he thought. And that brought him thoughts of Mary Meyer . . .

She had not been a casual, quick romp, nor even a long-term lover. She was that, but she was also a friend, an intimate of the family—along with her sister, Toni Bradlee, and Toni’s husband, Ben, Mary was a frequent guest at White House dinners, cruises on the Honey Fitz down the Potomac, weekends at the Cape. She was that rare woman Kennedy could find intellectual as well as sexual pleasure with . . . one of the few women whose company he sought back in the fall of ’63, after the death of Patrick. And then, last year, she’d been murdered during a walk along the canal towpath in Georgetown, most likely by a would-be robber or rapist. Her brother-in-law Ben had mentioned something about a diary, but as with all such matters, Kennedy trusted his friends to keep his secrets. Still, he missed her greatly.

More than personal discontent, President Kennedy’s foul mood was the product of a painful political dilemma. There was in John Kennedy’s makeup an acute sense of timing: he would temporize, delay, avoid making a decision unless he absolutely had to. And then he would act. He pushed back against the urgings of his advisors to strike the missiles in Cuba, even held back when a U-2 was shot down, waiting until Khrushchev found the running room to end the standoff. He’d split the difference in South Vietnam, telling his military, Okay, there’ll be support troops and we’ll see if they’re willing to help themselves, but we are not putting combat troops in there; it’s a recipe for disaster. And now the Americans were on their way out.

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