The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [375]
With this kind of coverage, Kennedy did not have to worry about carping journalists who thought it was their professional obligation to attack him. This was not a trifling business to him, and he negotiated over the filming of his children and his wife’s program as if an important treaty were at stake. The danger was that such coverage risked trivializing his presidency, turning him into a star and denying him the natural gravitas of his office.
A week after Jackie’s tour of the White House, the president had another splendid triumph when the astronaut John H. Glenn Jr. spun around the world three times in America’s first orbital space flight. On the morning when Glenn was being picked up from the tranquil waters of the Bahamas, however, the president was in a foul mood. He was sitting at his desk reading Time when he called Hugh Sidey, the magazine’s White House correspondent, into his office.
“Where did you get this goddamn item about me posing in this suit for Gentleman’s Quarterly?” Kennedy asked, throwing his copy of Time on the desk. Sidey fancied himself a serious reporter who had nothing to do with the trivia that sometimes found its way into the back of his magazine. He had no idea that Kennedy’s press secretary had allowed the Gentleman’s Quarterly photographer to represent his pool photo as an exclusive, and that Time was merely reprinting it.
“I … I … I don’t know, Mr. President,” Sidey stuttered. “I’ll try to find out.”
That was the stock answer that Kennedy heard too many times a day. He came around from the back of the desk and shook his fist in Sidey’s face. “You sons of bitches are out to get me,” Kennedy said, his face red and distorted. “You do this stuff, this personal stuff, as much as you can. You’re out to discredit me. People are remembered in this life for only one thing. They remember Coolidge because he appeared in that Indian war bonnet. They remember Arthur Godfrey because he buzzed the tower at Teterboro Airport. They’ll remember me as the man who posed for this.”
Kennedy would have raged on indefinitely, but Tazewell Shepard, the naval aide, gently injected himself to tell the president that Glenn had been picked up and was on the line. “Sidey, you son of a bitch, stand there and see if you can get this right.
“Oh, Colonel Glenn, what a great day!” Kennedy said into the phone as if all morning he had been waiting for this moment.
Sidey might be invited into the Oval Office for both exclusive interviews and condemnation, but no journalist in Washington was closer to the president than Joseph Alsop. Even though Kennedy had known Alsop for years as a social friend, the columnist had the audacity to write the president-elect saying that he viewed Kennedy’s election with “mixed feelings.” Instead of being angry at what others would have considered an intolerable impudence, Kennedy brilliantly co-opted the columnist. It proved to be among the most useful of the president’s many seductions. Alsop turned his column into a bully pulpit for the administration and used his considerable social power to advance Kennedy. Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, a connoisseur of power, watched on with admiration at the way the president led Alsop away from the paths of journalistic righteousness and turned him into his steward and shill. “Kennedy used Joe,” reflected Galbraith. “Joe assembled the Washington establishment for Kennedy. He convened them for Kennedy.”
Most of his life Kennedy had striven to be part of the upper-class, old-line Protestant world that Alsop so perfectly exemplified. The president and first lady were regular guests at dinner parties at Alsop’s splendid Georgetown