As I think about him–I really only knew him for the last five years of his life–he was really two people. He was urban, urbane, debonair, suave, witty, not a statesman really, but so bright. Then there was the other side–the tough Irishman, like his father and grandfather. That Kennedy was not suave and debonair. But why do we have to pick JFK apart and say he slept with a gangster’s girlfriend? It was awful, yes it was awful, but it doesn’t have anything to do with who he truly was.
With me he was warm and funny, really funny. He was a good tease and he loved to be teased. At the same time he had enormous powers of concentration. But he was so young! Think of what it must have been like before the Bay of Pigs [the CIA’s failed invasion of Cuba in April 1961, three months after JFK’s Inaugural], to go around the table and ask all those admirals and generals what to do, do we go? And they all said, “You’ve got to go.” He was still Lt. John Kennedy, not full of confidence. To be hit with something like this so fast. And yet he had the presence and the grace to take full responsibility, to use that wonderful line, “Victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.” It was a tough time, those first few months. When he came back from his summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in June, for days he carried around a page of the transcript of the meeting–the one in which Khrushchev warns him that it would be a cold winter in Berlin. He worried about nuclear war. He knew the dangers we faced. But he could still tease. At the time, there was a list of important Washingtonians, officials and so forth, who were to be evacuated from the capital to safety in case of war. He liked to announce with glee that I wasn’t on the list.
I guess talking to me took his mind off talking with national-security adviser Mac Bundy and counselor Ted Sorensen about Cuba or the Berlin crisis. He’d talk to me about what was on the cover of Time or who was the next good young journalist or, a little bit, who was fooling around with whom. He loved to gossip. He loved to dish. On Sunday mornings, he would read the newspapers aloud. “Did you see what that bastard did?” he would say. I had an understanding with him that I was always working and that I would use what he said unless he said it was taboo–which he often did. I crossed him from time to time and once was boycotted for three months. Finally, I was working on a story, knocking down a false story that he had been married once before, and I ran into him. “Where have you been?” he asked, and I knew I was out of the doghouse.
I thought he was quite formal with Jackie. He was not as natural as I idealized in a boy-girl relationship. But I don’t think she liked having me around. She didn’t like newspapermen much. She loved to dish, too. But not with me.
He wondered about what he would do after he was no longer president. There were a lot of jokes. “I can’t be the pope,” he would say. “Maybe I’ll run a paper,” he’d say. “That job is taken,” I’d say. He daydreamed about being a beachcomber, wandering the world. It must have been in his mind that he would not live forever. He’d been sick so many times, been read the last rites three times.
He changed American culture. He was the first TV president. Not that much was accomplished, let’s face it. But think of the promise when he came in, and even more, the sense of promise lost when he died. He made us realize that America was still a youthful country. I remember him at those press conferences. I can still see him: A question is asked. He pauses. You can see him get an idea. See the smile on his lips. The smile gets bigger, and he gives the answer. He loved it so.
