Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [169]
Ted Sorensen offered this moral verdict on Jack. “An American President, commander in chief of the world’s greatest military power, who during his presidency did not send one combat troop division abroad or drop one bomb, who used his presidency to break down the barriers of religious and racial equality and harmony in this country and to reach out to the victims of poverty and repression, who encouraged Americans to serve their communities and to love their neighbors regardless of the color of their skin, who waged war not on smaller nations but on poverty and illiteracy and mental illness in his own country, and who restored the appeal of politics for the young and sent Peace Corps volunteers overseas to work with the poor and untrained in other countries—was in my book a moral president, regardless of his personal misconduct.”
On October 4, Jackie left on a Caribbean cruise aboard Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, the Christina. The trip offered her a chance to regain her spirits. Jack took her absence as a chance to get to know his children better, and put in time as their babysitter. Pictures taken in the Oval Office show John Jr. peeking out from under the front of his father’s desk.
In late October, Kennedy was pounding away for passage of the civil rights bill. At one point, he called Mayor Richard Daley to put pressure on a Chicago congressman who was holding up the measure. Their conversation, packed with old-school politics, was picked up on the White House taping system:
Kennedy:
Roland Libonati is sticking it right up us.
Daley:
He is?
Kennedy:
Yeah, because he’s standing with the extreme liberals who are gonna end up with no bill at all. I asked him, “If you’ll vote for this package which we got together with the Republicans, [it] gives us about everything we wanted,” and he says, “No.”
Daley:
He’ll vote for it. He’ll vote for any goddamned thing you want.
Kennedy:
(laughs) Well, can you get him?
Daley:
I surely can. Where is he? Is he there?
Kennedy:
He’s in the other room.
Daley:
Well, you have Kenny. Tell Kenny to put him on the wire here.
Kennedy:
Or would you rather get him when he gets back to his office? That’s better. Otherwise, he might think . . .
Daley:
That’s better. But he’ll do it. The last time I told him, “Now look it. I don’t give a goddamned what it is. You vote for it, for anything the president wants and this is the way it will be and this the way it’s gonna be.”
Kennedy:
We have a chance to pull this out. Billy [Green] in Philadelphia got Toll. If you can get Libonati.
Using the muscle of his political pals, the same bosses who helped get him to the White House, Kennedy nailed down Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. By November, he had gotten it out of the committee, though stymied by the segregationist chairman of the Rules Committee, who refused to bring it to the House floor.
On November 2, Ngo Dinh Diem was killed in the military coup that the United States had signed off on in August. When he learned of the death, and the brutal manner of it, Kennedy bolted from the room in horror. Hearing the coup leader’s claim that Diem had taken his own life, Kennedy rejected it outright. He never believed that a fellow Roman Catholic would commit suicide. Ted Sorensen would later say: “Perhaps he should have guessed that, in that part of the world, the overthrow of Diem by the South Vietnamese army could well lead to Diem’s death. But I could see from the look of shock and dismay on JFK’s face when he heard the news of Diem’s assassination that he had no indication or even hint that anything more than Diem’s exile was contemplated.”
After retreating from the cabinet room, Jack called up Mary Meyer, his sometime mistress and friend. Not wanting to be alone, he spent the rest of the day with