The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [457]
Kennedy loved his wife, but he preferred bouquets to a single stem. He wrote his own cryptic rendezvous letter, but it was not to Jackie. Although the salutation has been clipped off the letter, it was most likely written in October to Mary Meyer, although Kennedy’s sex life was such that it could have been written to a number of other women as well.
Why don’t you leave suburbia for once—come and see me—either here or at the Cape next week or in Boston the 19th. I know it is unwise, irrational—and that you may hate it—on the other hand you may not—and I will love it. You say that it is good for me not to get what I want. After all of these years you should give me a more loving answer than that. Why don’t you just say yes. J.
There was a sentimental yearning in Kennedy these days that had long been dormant within him. In the middle of October, he hosted a state dinner for Sean Lemass, the prime minister of Ireland. During the dinner Kennedy scribbled a few notes for his eloquent toast about Ireland’s role as a beacon of liberty. The fiddlers and the bagpipers played the old Irish songs, but as so often with things Irish, it wasn’t until the hour grew late and almost everyone was gone that the evening truly began. A small group of no more than ten guests went upstairs to the family quartets, the president bringing the Irish bagpipers with them.
Gene Kelly danced an Irish jig, and the others sang, clapped, and laughed. Teddy sang too with such enthusiasm and emotion that no one cared if he sang out of tune. The greatest of Irish songs are sad ones, and the gathering was infused with a sweet melancholic sadness.
One of the president’s favorite songs, “The Boys of Wexford,” echoed poignantly through the White House.
We are the boys of Wexford,
Who fought with heart and hand
To burst in twain the galling chain
And free our native land.
When it came time to go, they sang “Danny Boy,” their Irish benediction. “The president had the sweetest and saddest kind of look on his face,” Jim Reed remembered. “He was over standing by himself leaning against the doorway there, and just sort of transported into a world of imagination apparently.”
In the third year of his administration, Kennedy still had an antipathy toward what he considered the prissy moral tone of American liberalism. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president had cooperated in an inside account for the Saturday Evening Post, written by his friend Charles Bartlett and Stewart Alsop. The two journalists found many top White House officials ready to savage UN Ambassador Stevenson, as long as they could do their mugging anonymously. One official said, “Adlai wanted a Munich. He wanted to trade the Turkish, Italian, and British missile bases for Cuban bases.” When Bartlett gave the article to Kennedy to read for criticism before publication, the president asked that the reference to Sorensen as a “dove” be taken out. Sorensen had been a noncombatant as a young man, and Kennedy apparently did not like the implication that a pacifist had pushed him toward peace. When it came to the devastating comments about Stevenson, however, the president uttered not a word. Instead, he called in Schlesinger, his favorite conduit of misinformation to Stevenson. Kennedy told the former professor “he understood that it [the article] accused Stevenson of advocating a Caribbean Munich.”
“Everyone will suppose that it came out of the White House because of Charley,” the president said. “Will you tell Adlai that I never talked to Charley or any other reporter about the Cuban crisis, and that this piece does not represent my views.”
Whatever weaknesses Stevenson may have had, a lack of honor was not one of them. He could have been as duplicitous as the president, calling in his reporters and defending himself with the truth. That would have ended the carping attacks that he suffered in the wake of the article, but it might have destroyed the American-Soviet deal, and it was not Stevenson’s way. Undersecretary of State George Ball noticed a change in the man. He went