The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [350]
Kennedy pushed Khrushchev hard, trying to get him to back off from signing a peace treaty with East Germany. He wanted the Soviet leader to promise that whatever happened, West Berlin’s rights of access to the West would be maintained. And every time Kennedy pushed, Khrushchev pushed back, giving nothing. “The calamities of a war will be shared equally,” Khrushchev said in a statement with which the president could scarcely disagree. “The decision to sign a peace treaty is firm and irrevocable and the Soviet Union will sign it in December if the U.S. refuses an interim agreement.”
“It will be a cold winter,” Kennedy said, ending his dialogue with the Russian leader.
Air Force One flew out of Vienna that afternoon, taking Kennedy for his first visit to London since becoming president. It should have been the most glorious of reunions, Kennedy returning in triumph to the city that his father had left in disgrace two decades before. The president was indeed doubly welcomed, as the leader of Great Britain’s most important ally and as a lover of the nation’s peoples and culture. But no matter how fine the champagne with which Kennedy was toasted, the taste of ashes stayed in his mouth.
On his one full day in London, the president attended the christening of Anna Christina Radziwill, the daughter of Jackie’s sister and her husband, Prince Radziwill. For a hundred years wealthy American women had been marrying impecunious European noblemen, appropriating royal titles, and if one of the ambitious Bouvier sisters was a first lady, the other was now a princess. The splendid chamber was full of the great names of England, solemnly witnessing this occasion. It was a glorious ceremony that had all the patina of ancient rituals, commemorating blood as the most sacred of inheritances.
Among the guests was columnist Joseph Alsop, a friend of the president and a man comfortable with the elites of Europe. While the glittering palaver went on elsewhere, Kennedy pulled Alsop off into a corner and for fifteen minutes unloaded on him in a tense, urgent voice. “I had no idea when I was at Vienna how serious it was,” Alsop said, nor did the American public. Alsop listened, thinking that for the first time Kennedy had to “really face up to the appalling moral burden that an American president now has to carry.”
When Kennedy arrived back in Washington, he was exhausted and went to bed a sick man. Except when he had little choice but to attend a public gathering, he barely stumbled out of bed for the next week. For the first time the White House announced that the president had hurt his back on his Canadian trip and that he was being treated with novocaine shots and swimming. He flew down to Palm Beach, where he took over the estate of Charles Wrightsman and swam laps in the heated pool.
Kennedy tried to play the healthy man, walking briskly down the ramp and entering his limousine without aid. But the public knew that their young president was hobbling around on crutches. This elicited a myriad of advice: the owner of the Bodark Crutch Company was appalled at the “cheap undependable pair of adjustable crutches” Kennedy was using; a British astrologer offered a “Natural Cure”; a Miami physician drove up to Palm Beach hoping to physically manipulate the president’s back; a Pulaski Foundation pilgrimage prayed for his recovery at the shrine of Czestochowa; chiropractors were ready to put their hands on the offending bones; the Sleeper Lounge Company offered an electrical Sleeper Lounge Adjust-A-Bed; and a molded-shoe manufacturer wanted to send a special shoe to the president. In America, genuine solicitousness meshed perfectly with opportunism, but the larger problem was that it was unthinkable