Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [172]
Jack spent the next weekend in Palm Beach with Torby Macdonald, now in his fifth term as a Massachusetts congressman. It was a bachelor party fueled by enough bonhomie to induce JFK to croon “The September Song” with extra feeling. That Monday, November 18, he traveled with George Smathers to Miami and Tampa to deliver speeches denouncing Castro and his regime.
“A small band of conspirators has stripped the Cuban people of their freedom and handed over the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban nation to forces beyond the hemisphere. This, and this alone, divides us. As long as it is true, nothing is possible. Once this barrier is removed, everything is possible.”
With the trip to Texas ahead of him, Kennedy worried about the South. “I wish I had this fucking thing over with,” he complained to Smathers. He also told him, “You’ve got to live each day like it’s your last day on earth.”
On November 22, having spent the night in Fort Worth, he agreed to meet outside, before breakfast, with a good crowd of union people. Despite the early morning drizzle, the crowd was warm and enthusiastic. Inside, as the business leaders sipped their coffee, he gave a tough speech on Vietnam. “Without the United States, South Vietnam would collapse overnight.”
Whatever concerns he had in the long run, whatever hesitation kept him from committing combat troops, he had those eighteen thousand “advisors” there on the ground. He was also thinking about an exit strategy. The day before, he’d asked his national security aide Michael Forrestal to “organize an in-depth study of every possible option we’ve got in Vietnam, including how to get out of there.”
On the way from Fort Worth to the airport later that morning, Jack grilled Congressman Jim Wright and Governor John Connally about the strange difference in politics between the city he’d just left and the one he was about to enter. Why is Fort Worth so Democratic and Dallas so angrily right-wing? It was his usual curiosity abetted here by fresh reason to wonder. After all, he’d just been given a hero’s welcome by the people of one city but remembered only too well Richard Nixon carrying Dallas with 65 percent in 1960. Now, there was the pall cast by the recent ugly treatment of Adlai Stevenson.
While Wright laid some of the blame on the conservative press, especially the Dallas Morning News, Connally offered a more sophisticated assessment of the difference between the two Texas cities. He said it could be traced to their different economies. Fort Worth was still a cowboy town. Dallas, on the other hand, was a white-collar town where people worked in high-rise office buildings. They identified with the folks on the floor above them, not the guy or woman working next to them in the stockyard or factory. They voted like their managers because they wanted to join them. This explained the shift of the city to the Republicans, a change that Connally understood and that was a precursor of his own ambitions.
Jack was just trying to figure it all out. He was out there in the American landscape, doing what he’d come very much to love, perhaps even more than the public service it allowed. He was on the road, doing the work of an American politician. He had goals, and he needed to be president to reach them.
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Bobby, Jack, Joe Sr., Teddy, and Joe Jr.
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At the London embassy
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Sister Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LEGACY
He was acutely responsive to the romance of history in
the making, to the drama of great events; and to national
sentiment.
—David Cecil, Young Melbourne
On a cold Friday night in late November 1963, Teddy White of Life magazine traveled through a driving rainstorm from New York to Cape Cod. When he arrived at Hyannis Port, he was received at the main house, Joseph P. Kennedy’s. He found the president’s widow fully composed despite the horror of the week before. Chuck Spalding was there, Dave Powers and a few others, but they quickly left the guest alone with the woman