The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [414]
Bobby arrived soon after the Soviet diplomat left. “The president of the United States, it can be said, was displeased with the spokesman of the Soviet Union,” Bobby wrote later in words of masterful understatement.
That evening at close to midnight, Kennedy went to the Oval Office. The meeting he had just attended with his top advisers normally would have been held in the Cabinet Room, but such an unusual event in the West Wing would have aroused reporters’ suspicions. Not only had he held the meeting in the Oval Room, but to further hide matters Bobby and eight of the other participants had arrived at the White House crowded into one limousine.
Only now when the others had left did Kennedy return to his presidential office by himself. As Kennedy sat there, he turned on a hidden switch and began dictating into a secret tape recorder. During the summer, he had begun recording White House meetings and phone conversations, unbeknownst to everyone but the technicians who monitored the machines, several secretaries, and almost certainly Bobby. The president was probably doing this largely to verify events in his own mind and to provide accurate recollections for the book he would inevitably write of his years in the White House. Kennedy switched the mechanisms in the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room on and off at his own personal volition. Even in the worst of moments, he had the presence of mind to turn the switch on before the Ex Comm meetings, creating an unprecedented secret documentation.
The president had no recording device in the room where the meeting had taken place this evening. So he went back to his office after a long day to record his own audio memorandum of the meeting. All his life Kennedy had kept a psychological distance from the world around him. He boxed his friends into a corner of his life and brought them out when he sought what each could give. Even Bobby saw only a part of his brother’s inner life. Kennedy brought his wife into his presence for family events and to add grace to public moments. Other women were a casual diversion, largely interchangeable. He shuttled other politicians in and out of his presence, rarely letting them know how much he disdained many of them. He savored his aides’ virtues and measured their weaknesses, but them too he always kept at a distance.
Now at the most important moment of his presidency and his public life, Kennedy was an observer of himself. The stakes were as high as they had ever been for an American president. His failure could lead to nuclear annihilation or, if he flinched from the Soviet challenge, to disgrace. Yet even now, after this tense, interminable day, he recorded the details of the meeting as if he were a reporter taking down events that involved someone else, and other lives.
“Secretary McNamara, Deputy Secretary Gilpatric, General Taylor, Attorney General, George Ball, Alexis Johnson,” he began, running down the names of the participants. Kennedy had a superb memory, one of the essential attributes of most successful politicians. His memory served him not merely in remembering thousands of constituents’ names, though he could do that, but in mastering details of legislation and policy and remembering promises made or half made. That evening he recorded the events of the meeting as if he had been there as the official secretary taking copious notes, not as the crucial figure in the room.
“Ed Martin, McGeorge Bundy, Ted Sorensen,” the president continued. Kennedy had an even greater memory for human character, which is essentially a recording of a person’s actions over time. He knew each one of these men as well as many others whom he was listening to outside this circle. He knew their institutional prejudices and their political passions