TOM PUTNAM: Good evening, and welcome everyone to the Kennedy Library. I'm Tom Putnam, the Library Director, and on behalf of Tom McNaught, Executive Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for coming, and acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: lead sponsor Bank of America, Raytheon, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation; and our media partners, The Boston Globe, Xfinity and WBUR.
I can think of no better way to launch the 2013 fall season of Forums than with this evening's discussion of Thurston Clarke's newest book, JFK's Last Hundred Days.
I was looking back at other events when both Mr. Clarke and our moderator Ted Widmer were here, and I noticed we began three years of our JFK programming with an event in early 2011 to mark the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's inauguration and the launching of the New Frontier. And this fall, of course, we will focus on many of the 50th anniversaries of events related to the last months of President Kennedy's life and presidency.
I'm a fan of Mr. Clarke's earlier books, especially The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America, and Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America. In fact, I often quote this line from the latter volume: "Kennedy's inaugural address was his philosophical autobiography, informed by his knowledge of the worst modern warfare can do, his fear of nuclear war, his understanding of the dynamics of third-world nationalism, and his encounters with abject poverty. ‘Ask Not’ was not only the master sentence of Kennedy's inaugural, but the master sentence of his life, what his books and speeches had been leading toward for a quarter of a century."
What struck me most about the newest volume was how Mr. Clarke weaves various strands of JFK's story into a refreshingly new tapestry. For example, I read in other volumes about how the loss of their baby, Patrick, saddened both the President and the First Lady and drew them together as a couple. And in the histories of Vietnam, I've come to learn about how JFK would later regret having almost unwittingly put the coup against President Diem in motion during a summer weekend on Cape Cod when his top military advisors were also on vacation. But I had never understood the confluence of those two stories until reading this new volume. I highly recommend it to all of you.
Thurston Clarke is a well-regarded author of fiction and non-fiction, including the acclaimed Pearl Harbor Ghost and his bestselling Lost Hero, which was made into an award-winning miniseries. He's a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and described by one reviewer as a masterful storyteller, whose newest book "does a marvelous job of reliving Camelot's fragile promise." The book is on sale in our bookstore, and Mr. Clarke will sign copies at the conclusion of the Forum.
Our moderator this evening is Ted Widmer, who is currently serving as an assistant to the new president of Brown University, and a senior advisor to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He's the former director of the John Carter Brown Library and a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, and a frequent commentator on the presidency of John F. Kennedy. I should note that Mr. Widmer has a plane to catch, so he will conduct the conversation with Mr. Clarke, and then I'll come back to help facilitate the question-and-answer period with all of you.
So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Thurston Clarke and Ted Widmer back to the Kennedy Library. [applause]
TED WIDMER: Thank you, Tom. Can you hear me okay? It's great to be back with so many friends at the Kennedy Library, and to celebrate a really important new publication. I'm gratified to know that we helped to begin the 50th anniversary celebrations. I don't actually remember that we did that, but I'm gratified to know that we did. And now we come up to the autumn of 1963 in our 50-year remembrance, and I can't recommend this book too highly as a comprehensive way to get at that very complicated time in our history, a time of great optimism, as you explain so clearly, and also a time of personal tragedy for President Kennedy. And perhaps we could just begin with where you got the idea to look at the last 100 days.
THURSTON CLARKE: Well, the idea came when everyone was talking about President Obama's first 100 days. And suddenly I thought to myself, “Well, this one President – usually the last 100 days for a President, he's a lame duck and nothing much happens -- this isn't going to be the case with John F. Kennedy.” And I knew enough – that just before the 100 days he'd submitted the Civil Rights Bill to Congress, he'd started the negotiations for the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which was then ratified during his last 100 days. So that was enough to start me on my way. Once I started reading about some of the other things that had happened, particularly the death of his son Patrick, which happened just a week before the actual 100 days begin, then I was hooked and I dove right into it.
TED WIDMER: It's really a dizzying time. There were extraordinary highs – the passage of the Nuclear Limited Arms Treaty – and, as you say, personal tragedy. How did you write both stories at the same time? What was your method as a historian? Were you listening to the tapes?
Were you coming here to do research in the papers?
THURSTON CLARKE: I did a lot of research here as I always have for the books. I found, still, the oral histories are a wonderful resource here and not completely mined either. I found some oral histories that were very illuminating, but particularly the tapes. And the tapes, as you know, have been transcribed and released recently, so that was some new material that was extremely important to me -- also, Ted Sorensen's memoirs and Jacqueline Kennedy's oral history that was finally released. There was all of this new material that has just come in the last three or four years, and this helped make the narrative.
I was moving in the narrative and trying to weave together the personal, the political and the presidential. You just mentioned the Vietnam coup; we can get into that. If there was one thing John F. Kennedy learned from the Bay of Pigs and then from the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was to get his advisors in a room, to ask a lot of questions, to listen to them debate, to be skeptical. But he approved this cable that essentially greenlighted a coup against President Diem of South Vietnam without doing any of that.
One of the reasons that it happened, I believe, was that he approved it a week and ten days after Patrick had died. He was wracked with grief. He was reading and re-reading the condolence letters. It was raining outside. Caroline Kennedy was acting up. He was the only one who could seem to be able to calm her; she was climbing into his lap. And then he was asked to approve this cable and he says, "Has Rusk seen it? Have other people seen it?" And everything's kind of lost in translation. He thinks that everybody else has approved it, and everybody else thinks that he's approved it. I think this is a way that the personal and the presidential kind of interacted, and this is what I tried to do throughout the book with other stories as well.
TED WIDMER: I read the book with a lot of satisfaction because as I was working through the tapes two years ago, I felt that, especially as we were getting into the year 1963, there were surprises. We all know this remarkable life story very, very well, and yet we can be surprised. The tapes are so rich. I think to this day, even though they have all been released now in their entirety, there is a lot lurking in there for the careful listener. As I listened really to pull out only a small percentage for a general audience, I was hoping a historian would come along and really mine them for the revelations. I think you have done that. They include the interesting news over and over again that he was really trying very hard a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis to make the world safer and specifically to build détente. We were just talking about the history of that word. But that comes out over and over again, they were rebuilding.
THURSTON CLARKE: I call it Kennedy's forgotten détente. The assassination was kind of a black hole, and a lot of things disappeared into this black hole. And this détente, I think, was one of them. We know about the Limited Test Ban Treaty, but that set a whole bunch of other things in motion.
Talking of the tapes, there's this fascinating conversation that he has with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin the end of August, in which Kennedy basically says that space and getting to the moon first doesn't interest him that much, and why doesn't the Soviet Union and the United States go to the moon together. This is, again, completely a result of the Test Ban Treaty. He was asked at a press conference the end of July, "We've heard rumors that the Russians aren't going to race you to the moon." And he says, "Oh, no, no, no, we're going to keep going to the moon; we don't care what they're doing."
Ten days later, the Test Ban Treaty is signed in Moscow, and then at the end of the August he has this conversation with Dobrynin. Then he gets together with James Webb a few weeks later, who's the head of NASA, and he talks again about how getting to the moon isn't that important, and maybe we could have a joint moon mission. Then he goes to the United Nations on the 20th of September and delivers this extraordinary speech which very few of his advisors know about it – he kept it very close to his chest – in which he proposes a joint moon mission saying, "Why should we send just the representatives of one nation to the moon? Why don't we send all of the nations to the moon?"
This is huge news. It's a black banner headline in the New York Times on the front page. It's in the Washington Post. The papers are talking about this détente. There were other things going on as well at the same time. A few weeks later, Kennedy agrees to sign off on the Russian wheat deal to sell surplus wheat to the Soviet Union. There's a hotline that's being installed. But this moon mission, I think, is the most forgotten part of the détente.
Now, around this time, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who was the British foreign secretary, goes and gives a speech to the UN in which he says, "I think we're seeing the beginning of the end of the Cold War." An extraordinary thing to say. The New York Times says that the General Assembly in 1963 was the most harmonious since the beginning of the United Nations. And there's more;.Khrushchev, in part of the correspondence with JFK, uses this phrase, “We could see the end of the Cold War."
This was Kennedy's goal. Kennedy felt that one of his paths to greatness was not putting a man on the moon, but settling the Cold War. If there was really going to be a détente, why spend all this money trying to beat the Russians to the moon when a joint moon mission could symbolize the détente and could also further it? So I like to say, imagine – I know we're not supposed to deal in what-might-have-beens -- but suppose there had been Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong together on the moon taking that step together. A fantasy, but still it's something that was a possibility and a possibility that has been forgotten.
TED WIDMER: So if he's taken this very significant step to solve the biggest international problem he had, he's also taking some pretty serious steps to solve what is probably his biggest domestic problem, the civil rights issue. We just passed through the 50th anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech. That was an important day for him. He had a legislative strategy, and you explain very clearly what he was setting out to do. What do you think his chances were of getting a bill through?
THURSTON CLARKE: He had gotten it through. The Civil Rights Bill he proposed in a speech on June 11th, right after he had given a speech -- his famous American University speech -- announcing that he was going to suspend nuclear testing and send negotiators to Moscow to negotiate a treaty to limit testing. He gave the kind of speech that Martin Luther King had been urging him to give for two years, which was a speech which framed civil rights as a moral issue. Not just a political issue, but as a moral issue. In fact, I think it's Harry Belafonte, or maybe it's somebody else in their oral history talk about the education of John F. Kennedy on race.
Well, Kennedy finally gives his famous speech, largely extemporaneous – he decided to do it on the spur of the moment – in which he refers to civil rights as a moral issue for the first time. What happens: The next day James Farmer of CORE says it's the finest civil rights speech given by any President, Lincoln included. Martin Luther King, who had been so disappointed with Kennedy – even the two days before had in the New York Times been saying, "Why doesn't Kennedy speak about civil rights as a moral issue" – turns to a friend and says, "Can you believe it? That white man not only stepped up to the plate, he hit it out of the park."
These two speeches -- and this is what consumes him in the final 100 days -- Kennedy is addressing the two great threats to the nation – civil rights and civil unrest, and nuclear war. Of course, I can see there are many of us here who can remember how terrifying the Cuban Missile Crisis was, and the American people certainly hadn't forgotten that a year later. I think this is why, and we can get into this, he takes this tour out West in which he suddenly discovers that peace is going to be an issue for the campaign in 1964.
TED WIDMER: That's fascinating. That was not a story I recalled from the classic biographies, and I think you really made the fall come alive in some new ways.
I've just read Robert Caro, the latest installment in his epic biography of LBJ, and the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 is a centerpiece, obviously, in what LBJ did. It was heroic, a kind of classic example of a President rolling up his sleeves. It's hard to imagine the LBJ of the fall of '63 becoming the LBJ of 1964.
THURSTON CLARKE: I know.
TED WIDMER: He's such a diminished figure. Even for those of us who admire President Kennedy greatly, it's unlikely he could have got as strong a bill through as the one LBJ did get through. Do you agree with that?
THURSTON CLARKE: I agree. I think he certainly probably wouldn't have gotten it through until '64. Of course, he wouldn't have had his own assassination as a factor, but I think he would have gotten it through in some form in '64.
Here's something that really surprised me when I was looking at the reaction after his death. An article in Look magazine a year later, called "What Happened to the Kennedy Program?," and the author interviewed the leaders of Congress, Everett Dirksen and Mike Mansfield, the Senator Majority and Minority leader, and Charlie Halleck and Carl Albert, and asked them what would have happened. Now, the background to this is that these men were all very well acquainted with Lyndon Johnson, and they knew that he was a touchy customer, and bore grudges, and was a very proud man. They knew, also, that they were going to have to deal with him for another four years. Well, you read in the book, they said extraordinary things about …The program had already been made, that it was Kennedy's program, that Kennedy would have gotten it through, and these were the Republicans talking, and the Democrats. I don't think that it was just an urge to memorialize Kennedy. I think they had to believe this. There was political risk -- not great political risk -- but political risk making these kind of comments.
TED WIDMER: Speaking of political risk, part of the heroism of his very forward-leaning stance on civil rights in the summer and fall is that it imperiled his reelection possibility. You cite evidence on both sides. The polls were good for him, but also there's an amazing -- I think it's from Lou Harris -- a calculation that if he lost Texas, he would have 266 electoral votes probably, four shy of what he needed to be reelected with not a whole lot of hope for getting Alabama or Mississippi. So the South was in play and civil rights was a major factor in his reelection.
THURSTON CLARKE: The South had definitely put civil rights in play, and I agree. On the other hand, though -- we talked about it -- Kennedy took this tour out West to states that were thought to be Goldwater territory. He was going to speak about an issue that bored him silly, which was ecology and conservation in the country. This was an urban man, and these were not subjects about which he had any great passion. In fact, the first couple of speeches that he gave on this tour in Duluth and somewhere in Wisconsin, the reporters said, one of them, it was the worst speech of his presidency, that he was bored, he was diffident, and his advisors were in despair.
Then he gets to Billings, Montana and he's with Mike Mansfield, Senator from Montana, and he throws in a line at the beginning of the speech about Mike Mansfield and how he'd been so helpful in getting the Limited Test Ban Treaty through Congress -- first mention of the Test Ban Treaty. Suddenly, there's this applause and cheers and Kennedy throws away the rest of his speech and talks about peace, because he realizes that's what people want to hear. After that, he's on fire. The rest of the speeches -- forget about ecology and everything else -- these were subjects that the people in the audience knew more about than he did, so he talked about peace.
Of course, again, less than a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he's giving this speech in places that are ringed by Minuteman missiles that were going to be targets. After the tour, he turns to someone and says, "We're going to run on peace and prosperity." There's also the extraordinary speech of this whole Western tour when he goes to Salt Lake City to the Mormon Tabernacle and he gives a speech and, again, people are rising on their feet and applauding in this very Republican venue and town.
So I think that there was an urge for peace that he tapped in to, that he had to be shown this, and it demonstrated to him that this was going to be a winning issue. I think that that's something, of course, again, that hurt Goldwater when he was running against Johnson, because he was seen as someone who was going recklessly to put us in danger of a nuclear war – the famous little girl, the Daisy ad that only appeared once.
TED WIDMER: Do you think he was cruising to a pretty easy reelection in '64?
THURSTON CLARKE: I do think so. I think most people thought he was. Of course, he makes some kind of comments to his buddies -- I think it's to Paul Thayer, or, I can't remember who it was -- he says, "Give me good ole Barry and we won't have to leave the Oval Office." But he actually admired him as a competitor, he liked Barry Goldwater. They'd been friends in Congress, and Goldwater liked him. So I think it wouldn't have been a nasty campaign. I think it would have been quite a high-minded campaign, but I think Kennedy would have won.
TED WIDMER: You focus on a meeting that I found fascinating when I listened to the tapes, with some political advisors anticipating the convention and the campaign. It wasn't just that the South was beginning to pull away in the way that we know that it did, but the suburbs were becoming very important. So the Democratic coalition was changing and he was on that; he knew that was coming.
THURSTON CLARKE: The tapes are so wonderful on this because you hear him coming around, suddenly being a bit surprised. And he's saying, "We're going to run on poverty and we're going to reach to the" – and then, I think it's Richard Scanlon, the pollster, says, "Well, wait a minute. How about these people that are moving to the suburbs?" And Kennedy gets it right away. He says, "Well, how much does it take? How much does somebody have to make when they move to the suburbs to go from being a Democrat to a Republican? What is it, $8,000 or $10,000? What do you have to make to be a Republican?"
TED WIDMER: I think the answer was 10.
THURSTON CLARKE: The answer was 10,000. So this wonderful conversation about, so how are we going to do it? And then at the end, Kennedy is kind of convinced that he's got to appeal to these suburban voters, to these new suburban voters.
The other interesting thing about that meeting is it's the first meeting to play his reelection campaign, and 13, 14 advisors are there. Everyone is there. It's the big meeting. Except for Lyndon Johnson, who hasn't been invited, according to Ted Sorensen, because he didn't have, quote, “the complete confidence of everyone in the room.” And then we can get into the question about whether or not Kennedy would have kept Johnson on the ticket.
TED WIDMER: Why don't we?
THURSTON CLARKE: Why don't we, yes.
TED WIDMER: It's such an interesting question.
THURSTON CLARKE: And quite controversial. Any of you who have read Caro's book know that … Well, let's back up. Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy's secretary, her book in 1968, Kennedy and Johnson, she describes two conversations that she has with JFK. The first one comes right after this meeting which Johnson hasn't attended. And of course, if you weren't going to have him as Vice President, you wouldn't want to have him come to the planning meeting for an election in which he's not going to be in. And Evelyn Lincoln says, "Oh I'm so worried about the convention because it's going to be so boring because last time there was such excitement about who was going to get it, and now we know what's going to happen." And Kennedy looks at her and says, "Well, I don't know, there might be a change in the ticket."
So she recounts that in her book. Then, in much greater detail, the day after he gets back from a trip to Miami and Tampa, he sits in the rocking chair. Most of the other people are tired, Ken O'Donnell and Dave Powers, they haven't come in because they're exhausted. So Kennedy is there and he says, "Where are those clowns?" And Evelyn Lincoln says, "Oh, they're too tired." And he says, "Well, we're here, Miss Lincoln." So he sits and he rocks in the chair, almost stream of consciousness, he talks about how he wants to make government an honorable profession, that he wants to change some of the outmoded rules in Congress. And then he says, "To do that, I'm going to need someone who believes as I do as a vice president." And then Evelyn Lincoln says, "Well, who is your choice for vice president?" And he says, "Well, I'm thinking of Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina." A choice that made sense -- he kind of represented the New South that Kennedy hoped to court in the election.
Now, it's no secret that Evelyn Lincoln wasn't a great fan of Lyndon Johnson's, so that comment has been kind of brushed aside. Caro brings it up and mentions it to kind of demolish it and quotes Arthur Schlesinger in his book about Bobby Kennedy, in which Bobby Kennedy said, "Can you imagine my brother having a conversation with Evelyn Lincoln about something like that?" And then Caro goes on to say, "And I interviewed Schlesinger and" – I can't remember if it was Sorensen or who – "and they described Lincoln as a rather flighty, scatterbrained woman." As if this is enough to discount that this conversation happened!
Well, whatever else Evelyn Lincoln was, she had a BA from George Washington University and two years of law school, which was two more years than Kennedy had. So I'm not so sure that he wouldn't have said this. And actually, in Evelyn Lincoln's papers here, there's the dated shorthand. She says in the book that, "It was such an interesting conversation, I took notes." And there is the shorthand, in I think Box Five or Six, of this conversation on White House memo pad. This is the White House, November 19th. And it has been transcribed, I believe by Lincoln, but perhaps by someone else, and it shows that Kennedy said exactly that to Lincoln.
Ah, but the question is: Did he mean it? Or was it just something, as Terry Sanford said later in his oral history, something that he kind of said to get off his chest? I think he meant it. I think he meant it because his relations with Johnson in the fall of '63 had really reached a nadir. They were hardly ever together. Johnson was, by the admission of his own friends and advisors, quite depressed.
And Johnson also – we were just talking a little bit earlier about Kennedy's forgotten détente and the wheat deal – Johnson was more of a hawk on the Cold War than Kennedy was, and he was very much against the wheat deal. In fact, he says to Ken O'Donnell, Kennedy's close advisor, "This is the worst political mistake the President has made." And then he says, "And you can tell him I said that."
Again, I talked about this new material that's come out, Ted Sorensen's memoirs. In his memoirs, Ted Sorensen reveals for the first time that he gave a typescript of his book, Kennedy, which was published in 1965, to Jackie Kennedy for her comments, and she had deleted and argued with every single favorable reference to Lyndon Johnson that he had written. Where Sorensen had written that the President admired Johnson or looked up to him, Jackie said, "I think you overstate this from Kennedy's point of view, and you must know as well as I do that in the last months of his presidency, he was truly terrified of what would happen if Lyndon Johnson became President." This was something that was on his mind. He goes out on the Honey Fitz with his friend, the journalist Charlie Bartlett in September, and turns to him and says, "How do you think Lyndon would be if I got killed?" So this is something that was certainly on Kennedy's mind. Also, we have the oral history that Jackie gave to Arthur Schlesinger in which she says some similar things about how her husband had become very disillusioned and lost confidence in Johnson.
This is one of the things you see when you put history, microhistory, under a microscope. You find things that may have escaped other people. One of Johnson's close friends – his name is in the book, but I've just forgotten it -- Johnson turns to him two or three weeks before Dallas and says, "I'm going to tell Kennedy I don't want to run for Vice President. And we're going to go back to Texas and open a newspaper and I'll be the editor and you be the publisher." And the guy – I wish I could remember his name but this is the problem when there are so many names in your book; it'll come to me – he says, "Oh, I think it was just Johnson wanting to get it off this chest." And Johnson says, "I'm going to tell Kennedy in Austin on the 22nd," which is where they were going after Dallas, "and I'm going to tell him that I don't want it."
I'm not sure that he would have, I don't think he would have said it, but it shows that maybe Johnson was getting a little nervous about his position. And usually, the arguments that are trotted out to say that Kennedy would never have gotten rid of Johnson -- that the rumors were false -- are by people like Senator Smathers, who on the flight down to Florida five days before brings up the rumor that JFK was going to get rid of Johnson and Kennedy says, "Nonsense, of course I'm not going to do that. That would be the dumbest thing I could do." Well, of course, if he's going to do it, he's not going to tell a Democratic Senator a year before the convention that he's going to ditch Johnson. And the same thing with Charlie Bartlett and his friends who are journalists, who bring it up, and he says the same thing to them. Anyway, I think there's a good chance that he would have replaced Johnson, and I'm positive that he had that conversation with Evelyn Lincoln.
TED WIDMER: You mentioned the temptation and also the danger of speculating in what-ifs, but it's so endlessly interesting and fun to think about. You correctly identified LBJ as more of a hawk and the great tragedy of the presidency that did come to Lyndon Johnson, of course, is Vietnam. Your book is very eloquent and well researched on the Vietnam question, which is a hard one. I mean, there's a lot of evidence on both sides and no one can say with complete certainty what future was coming to Vietnam in a second Kennedy term. But can you tell us a little bit of your private thinking?
THURSTON CLARKE: Well, my thinking, first of all, is … What I said, which has been lost on some people, is I'm talking about in the end what Kennedy intended to do. Not what he would have necessarily accomplished, but what he intended to do. With a reminder that this was a man who, throughout his life, had pretty much succeeded at what he intended to do. He intended to get into combat in World War II, and despite failing a physical and being put into military intelligence, got himself into that PT boat. He ran for House of Representatives when he was probably the illest in his life in 1946. People discounted his chances and he won. He knocked off Henry Cabot Lodge and won the Senate seat from Massachusetts during the Eisenhower landslide. He won a Pulitzer Prize. And he was the first Catholic to occupy the White House. So this was somebody who, it's a powerful thing to say this is what he intended to do.
On Vietnam, I'm convinced what he would not have done, and that is send combat units into Vietnam. I say that because he resisted this on five or six occasions throughout his Presidency when it was the recommendation of his advisors, of McNamara, of Maxwell Taylor, and of others who he sent to Vietnam. They would come back and recommend, and the Joint Chiefs would ask for, combat units. It was the one line that Kennedy wouldn't cross. He would send advisors, but he wouldn't send combat units. That was an important distinction to him, and he mentioned this again and again.
Now, of course, as you see in the book, we do have in October, it's announced that he's going to remove 1,000 advisors and that he's going to bring the rest with the goal of removing all of them by 1965. Would he have been able to do that, particularly after the chaos that followed the Diem coup? We can't be sure. But we can be sure that he intended never to send US combat units into battle in Vietnam.
That is also, again, the consensus of people like McGeorge Bundy and McNamara and Taylor and Clark Clifford, and all of these people who advised Johnson on Vietnam, who make a distinction between what Johnson would have done and what Kennedy would have done. In their memoirs and in their oral histories -- the oral history that McGeorge Bundy gives to the LBJ Library -- they say that Kennedy had a different approach and that they doubt that he would have sent combat units.
There's a wonderful woman in Washington, Marie Ridder, who has been a great source for me, who knew both Bobby and JFK very, very well. I often, when I'm in Washington have dinner with her, because you never know what she's going to remember and say. And we were talking about Vietnam and what he would have done and she said, "Well, you know, I was on a ski lift in Aspen with Walt Rostow," who was one of the big hawks of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, and she said, "We were riding the ski lift and he turned to me and he said, 'You know, I'm doing much better with Johnson on Vietnam because Kennedy wouldn't listen to me.'"
TED WIDMER: Reading the leadup to the coup in November of '63 that removed Diem and his brother and the tensions between JFK and his ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, I had the uncomfortable feeling that the whole war came out of a Boston political squabble going back to about 1890.
THURSTON CLARKE: Yes, well, the Lodges and the Kennedys were terrific rivals. And of course, it went back to, as you say, rivalries in the 19th century. Kennedy had, of course, beaten Lodge to be Senator. And then Lodge had run as Vice President with Nixon, and then Ted Kennedy beat Lodge's son in '62. Before that, Kennedy's grandfather had run against Lodge's father, I guess it was, and had lost, so this was a longstanding rivalry.
One of the reasons, I think, that Kennedy sent Lodge was – first of all, Vietnam was not big on his screen until the demonstrations against Diem. And remember that famous photo of the monk immolating himself and then the Buddhist demonstrations against Diem? Then it became of more interest to him. But the appointment of Lodge, I think, was somewhat of a frivolous thing to do. Not frivolous, but the feeling that Kennedy had was we were not going to come to a happy end in Vietnam and that he was eventually going to get out and he wanted a Republican there to take some of the heat from him, and he liked the idea of putting Lodge in this situation. That's what Schlesinger and others of his people have said. I think there's a certain amount of truth to it.
Of course, once Lodge went there, there's this moment when – and again, Kennedy taped his meeting with Lodge -- in which Kennedy says to him … They're having this conversation and Kennedy's getting bored. He was a credible doodler and the conversation that he's having with Lodge, he's filling pages with doodles. He's writing Vietnam over and over and over again. And you can hear him on the tape going, "Ah huh, ah huh, ah huh, ah huh." And then he finally gets so bored, he finally says, "Well"– and they're talking about a possible coup -- "Well, I think we'll have to leave that almost completely in your hands." Then suddenly realizing what he has said to this proud man, who was notoriously difficult with Eisenhower when he was UN Ambassador taking orders, he tries to back up a little bit. But in fact, Lodge is pretty much playing his own game in Vietnam.
I think that Kennedy's handling of Lodge and the Diem coup is the black mark on the last 100 days. Not so much that Kennedy organized the coup or anything else, but that he wasn't concentrating on it and it kept coming up. His concern was not whether it was the right thing or a smart thing to get rid of Diem. It was whether, if these generals were going to do it, was the damn thing to succeed. He was looking at it through the prism of the Bay of Pigs. He didn't want another catastrophe like the Bay of Pigs. To have this coup be mounted by the generals – which had been greenlighted by us, although he tried to claw back the greenlight and there was a lot of back-and-forth in these six weeks and the generals getting cold feet – the last thing he wanted was a defeat.
So right up to the end he's cabling Lodge and saying, "Unless you can promise me that this thing is going to be successful, then we have to stop it." And Lodge is trying to tell him, "We can't stop it because it's not being done by us; it's being done by these generals." And then he finally said, "They've said they're going to give us four days' notice." I think they gave them four minutes' notice in the end. I think generally the last 100 days were a great time of accomplishment and promise for Kennedy, and certainly the handling of the coup in Vietnam was the black mark.
TED WIDMER: If you don't mind another somewhat ahistorical question, we're in a week right now in which a President is going to Congress to ask for approval of a military intervention that is in some trouble and it's not entirely certain how Congress will vote, it's not entirely certain how the American public feel. And in listening to the tapes, I felt that there was always a very clear sense of, in the mind of the Senate at least and probably the House -- they were very empowered assistants like Kenny O'Donnell and Larry O'Brien -- but Senators coming into the Oval Office a lot for long, substantive conversations with the President. I wonder if that tradition has been neglected over the past few decades where Senators don't come in one-on-one the way they used to. It worked.
THURSTON CLARKE: It did work, and it worked particularly with his relationship with Everett Dirksen. He and Dirksen were friends. In fact, when Dirksen was running for reelection from Illinois in '62, Kennedy gave very lukewarm support to his Democratic opponent, made it clear that actually Kennedy would have preferred to have Dirksen. Kennedy also came to a certain relationship with Charlie Halleck, who was the House Minority Leader, over the Civil Rights Bill, which in the end there's this wonderful conversation where Halleck agrees to go along and to push the bill with other Republicans. Halleck then talks about, explains himself – and this is kind of a personal revelation; it shows the kind of trust that these people had – he says, "Well, whenever I go down to" – I guess it's Warm Springs where Roosevelt went – "I go down there every year with my driver, who I like a lot, and he can't stay in the hotels, and it just makes me so angry." Then he pauses and says, "Sometimes a guy does the right thing." So I think you're right.
Two things politically that you look at in these 100 days, or that I saw, is how often these Senators – he's meeting with Scoop Jackson, who was the hawkish Democrat, to try to get him to come around on the Test Ban Treaty, to promote it -- you can see the coming and going, the conversation. This was an ongoing enterprise for Kennedy. And of course, the other thing is that Kennedy gave a press conference, on average, every 16 days.
TED WIDMER: Yeah, that's amazing.
THURSTON CLARKE: Extraordinary when you think about it – a live press conference, televised, every 16 days. I don't think I made this connection in the book, but I think that when you look at the unprecedented grief and the way people mourned him as if he was a member of the family – you hear this again and again, 56% of the country told the pollsters from the University of Chicago that they had shed real tears when he died – one of the reasons was they saw him every 16 days fielding questions. And, of course, he was at his best. He was better at press conferences and extemporaneously, I think, than delivering a prepared speech, even though the words in the prepared speech were moving. But he was at his best in these press conferences, every 16 days. Extraordinary.
TED WIDMER: Maybe we should go back to the personal for a moment. You talked about the presidential, the political and the personal. The book begins with this extraordinary tragedy, the death of his infant son Patrick. In general, he seems to have compartmentalized it. You do make the very interesting point that he might have been off his game a little bit that August weekend.
But do you think it was successfully compartmentalized? How did he deal with it?
THURSTON CLARKE: I think he tried to. He was famous for compartmentalizing his friends, for compartmentalizing different parts of his life. It was a huge shock to him. He wept in Jackie's arms twice – when he came back from the son dying and coming back from the funeral. He cried at the funeral. He tried to pick up the coffin and walk out with it, and Cardinal Cushing had to persuade him not to do this. He makes this comment to Jackie -- that her mother says was incredibly powerful to her -- and he says, "We can't let this grief get in the way of what we have to do." Talking about the mission, a joint mission, we, having to do something together. So I think that the thing was compartmental. He didn't want to bring it into the White House, although he does read and re-read the condolence letters.
And then there is this moment when he visits the Space Center in Houston and he goes and sees the room where the astronauts are preparing for weightlessness on the moon and he looks through a porthole. And it's exactly like -- and Jackie mentions this later -- the facility, the huge iron lung, this submarine thing, where they put Patrick in Children's Hospital. He was the first child to be put in one of these. And so, Kennedy definitely saw that connection when he went to Houston and spent some time there. But I think that that stayed with him.
At their wedding anniversary, when they had their 10th wedding anniversary, the personal presents that they gave to each other revolved around Patrick. She gave him a St. Christopher's medal that had been fashioned into a money clip which she had given him when they were married, and he had slipped that into Patrick's coffin so she gave him a replacement. He gave her a ring with emeralds, which are of course green, which was meant to symbolize how Patrick had fought like an Irishman to live.
So I think that this loss haunted them and brought them together. And again, I have to go to my friend Marie Ridder who recounts a conversation that Jackie had about three weeks before Dallas in which she says, "I think we're going to make it," and then she paused and said, "I think I've won." So she was convinced that the atmosphere in their marriage had changed in these 100 days. She also made a similar comment in 1964 to a Jesuit priest who had become kind of confessor and her confidant, who was a professor at Georgetown, in which she says a very similar thing -- that Dallas had happened "just when we were going to have a real life together." A real marriage, I think is the phrase she uses.
TED WIDMER: And it was highly symbolic, wasn't it, that she was out there campaigning with him in Dallas.
THURSTON CLARKE: Yes. That was a huge thing for her to do, and to do it so soon. She'd announced, originally it was announced that after Patrick's death, she wasn't going to resume her schedule, I think, until the first of the year. She decided to go to Dallas, and she was quite enthusiastic and excited about it. She again saw this as a way of bringing them closer together, as part of the marriage changing and then become closer, this trip to Dallas.
And the first day was a huge success. She was very popular. In fact, he was fussing all the time and worrying because he wanted her to have a good time because he was afraid if she didn't have a good time, if her hair got blown around too much and if the clothes weren't right … He was very upset because her clothes were wrong for the weather; the weather forecast changed. He wanted her to campaign. He knew she was a very potent campaign weapon, and this is why I think he was so touchy and sensitive about several small details before they went to Dallas.
TED WIDMER: You have in more than a few places in your book some odd, fascinating premonitions of his death, including some innocent playacting on a boat, but also other moments. You mentioned one already, "Can you imagine Lyndon Johnson being President." But it does seem like there were moments when they were kind of thinking about it.
THURSTON CLARKE: Yes. And one reason is, of course, that Kennedy was someone who had a lot of close calls. He knew the narrow margins between life and death. Standing a few feet closer to where that Japanese destroyer came through PT-109, he would have been killed. He'd been given the Last Rites. He almost died after the botched operation on his back in, I think, it was '55. He was very sick at the end of the trip he took to Asia with Bobby Kennedy in 1951 and almost died.
He understood the close margins. But also, again something which we have to remember, he was fascinated by Lincoln and by the Lincoln assassination. He talks about Lincoln's assassination again and again, makes references to it. He has Jim Bishop, who came to write "A Day in the Life of President Kennedy," had written "A Day in the Life of President Eisenhower," but also had written The Day Lincoln Was Shot. And Kennedy is quizzing him about it all the time.
Well, of course, Kennedy is haunted by Lincoln because every minute, every couple of weeks, there's another 100th anniversary of something that Lincoln has done, of a Civil War battle, of the Emancipation Proclamation. So Kennedy is always haunted by Lincoln, which is why he makes that comment after the successful settling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I can't remember who he says this to, but he turns to one of his aides and says, "Tonight's the night we should go to the theatre."
TED WIDMER: You have that arresting phrase, an iceberg, which I think comes from a quote by Mrs. Kennedy, is that right?
THURSTON CLARKE: Yes.
TED WIDMER: It's a great quote, meaning a little bit of the personality is visible above the surface, and a lot is below the surface, invisible. But you shed a lot of light on what was below the surface. Have you gotten as far as you wanted to?
THURSTON CLARKE: I don't think you can ever get as far as you want to with Kennedy because he was secretive and so complicated, and he compartmentalized so much. In fact, if you look a the beginning of the book -- I open with Elaine de Kooning, who was essentially driven crazy by trying to capture his essence into a single portrait for the Truman Library and ended up doing nothing but painting Kennedy for a whole year, doing 30 oil paintings, covering the walls of her studio with drawings and sketches and everything of Kennedy.
So you can never get to the final thing. I like to think I got closer, and I think I got closer because I realized that if you want to get to the truth of a man who compartmentalizes his friends and his life, well, you have to look in all the compartments, not just the political, but the presidential, the personal. And that's what I tried to do, to look in those compartments, and, as I say in the book, with a view to solving what I consider the great mystery, which is not who shot Kennedy, but who he was when he was shot and where he intended to take us.
TED WIDMER: I do think just as a reader of a lot of biographies of Kennedy's, it's worth saying to all of you, this book really delves deeply in some new sources that have never been available until the last year-and-a-half or so, which are the audio tapes from 1963. So we have much more nuance, thanks to Thurston, about this period exactly, the last three months of his life. So it's very welcome.
You make another point that is surprising, which is we've heard for years about his health and the attempts to conceal the state of his health, but in fact he was getting healthier. He looked good, he was feeling good.
THURSTON CLARKE: Thanks to Dr. Hans Kraus, who is another one of the forgotten people of the Kennedy Administration, because Kennedy didn't want people to know about it. He was a famous New York orthopedic surgeon. He believed in exercise to cure the kind of back ailments that Kennedy had. He put him on a special exercise regime. He came to the White House almost weekly for a while in '61/'62. Essentially, Kennedy's back, by the summer of '63, Kraus considered him cured. And he said, "If he'd been a normal patient, I would have stopped seeing him." Kennedy played golf for the first time; he threw John in the air. He did all these things he couldn't do before. And it was exercise in the White House. You can actually look … There's a wonderful book that's been written about Hans Kraus. You also can buy his exercise program. And believe me, I've sometimes had some back problems and I've tried a few of the things and they work.
But Kraus was a famous mountaineer. He was a great personality, and I think Kennedy warmed to him. That's one of the reasons that he probably followed his advice; he didn't want to disappoint him.
TED WIDMER: I admire President Kennedy on just about every point, but many of you, like me, probably suffered through those presidential fitness tests in elementary school. I think that's a legacy of that.
THURSTON CLARKE: Well, we didn't do the 50-mile walk.
TED WIDMER: Another fascinating revelation is how many doctors' offices were being ransacked to get at his medical files. You, in a footnote, make the very interesting speculation that it resembled the Ellsberg break-in ten years later and that we don't know who was trying so hard to get those files.
THURSTON CLARKE: Somebody was. In the summer of 1960, his two doctors, his endocrinologists, Dr. Cohen and Dr. Travell, both had their offices broken into on the same weekend. Files in one of them -- I can't remember which one -- I think Travell had locked Kennedy's file somewhere else. And Cohen had put him under another name, put him under another initial. Then a couple of years later, the same thing happened to Hans Kraus. Someone broke into his office looking for material on Kennedy as well.
Kraus was told to only call Kennedy from pay phones. They had this kind of way because Kennedy was worried, that he didn't want people to know that -- as he said once to Pierre Salinger -- "I don't want them to know their President's falling apart." Which is why he didn't want the news that he had a minor groin pull to get out.
TED WIDMER: I was surprised by a few policy directions that you revealed, including the emphasis on poverty and the travel to Kentucky and places like that which I associate in my mind with Robert Kennedy's travels through impoverished regions in advance of his run in '68. But it seems like poverty, maybe because of Michael Harrington's The Other America, but even in this very wealthy time poverty was on his mind.
THURSTON CLARKE: It was on his mind because of campaigning in West Virginia in 1960; that made a big impression on him. In his inaugural address, if you look at it, there are a number of references to the poor and poverty, more than we have seen since that inaugural address. The first thing he did when he took office was to increase the amount of food available under an agricultural program to the poor.
And he was very moved by an article on the front page of the New York Times in late October of 1963 by Homer Bigart about the heartbreaking conditions in Kentucky. And because he'd seen these in West Virginia, it touched him. This is when he calls …Walter Heller had been pushing for some kind of a poverty program and Kennedy had been saying to Heller, "First, you're going to get your tax cut and then I'm going to get my"– I don't think he called it poverty, but "my growth," or "my jobs program." That's when he tells Heller and everybody to put together a task force for Kentucky, and in the last six weeks they do this. They get the governor and there are meetings, and all kinds of things start happening in Kentucky because Kennedy has been so touched by this article. He talks about what it's going to be -- he doesn't call it a war on poverty but his poverty program -- in his next term.
TED WIDMER: That's one of my ways you get the sense from this book of a President who is expanding. He's never static, he's learning, he's reading, he's giving new kinds of speeches. And it basically is very hard to know what the future held for him because he was changing …
THURSTON CLARKE: He changed, yeah.
TED WIDMER: … even in these 100 days, he changed a lot from August to November.
THURSTON CLARKE: Sure. That's why I say if you want to know what he intended to do, what might have happened, you have to look and see these last 100 days. It doesn't do any good – because this wasn't the Kennedy who was too cautious on civil rights for two years, it wasn't the Kennedy of the Bay of Pigs, it wasn't the Kennedy about which Paul Samuelson, his economic advisor, said was a very timid man who was always checking the ice in front of him before he moved forward politically. That Kennedy was pretty much gone by the last 100 days, and I don't think he would have reappeared.
TED WIDMER: I had a funny moment in reading it. I had this notepad and my pencil out and there's a moment where he complains about "these damn historians with their pencils out." [laughter] He was pretty clearly getting ready to write memoirs. I think that's why he was taping. That's my opinion, and I bet they would have been remarkable memoirs and he probably would have not spared himself from criticism, also. His style in conversation was to be honest about his faults. What do you think about the memoirs that he might have written?
THURSTON CLARKE: We have the dictation that he did after the Diem coup, just afterwards, in which he admits that it was his – "I must take responsibility for it." He says that he was at fault. I think they would have been unsparing. I think they would have been literate. I think that with the taping material – because he didn't, like Nixon, just tape everything. He only pressed those secret buttons under the coffee table in the Oval Office when he thought it was something that he wanted for his memoirs. Luckily, he sometimes forgot to turn it off and there are some rather salty conversations that happened on the end of some of those other more historically important conversations. [laughter]
But he knew, he was very aware that Arthur Schlesinger was going to write about the Administration and probably Ted Sorensen, too, but certainly Schlesinger. And he's a very competitive man and Schlesinger, of course, none of them knew about the tapes. Kennedy was the only one who was going to have the tapes. I think he would have written a great memoir, unsparing. I'm convinced that he thought he could write the best presidential memoir since Ulysses Grant, or probably he thought he could write a better memoir since Ulysses S. Grant. But that's the kind of competitive spirit that he had and that he would have brought to these memoirs.
TED WIDMER: I just got the signal from Amy that it's time for me to catch my plane. But I want to thank you for a fascinating conversation …
THURSTON CLARKE: Thank you, Ted.
TED WIDMER: … and a really important book. I want to thank all of you for your attention and ask Tom Putnam to come up and field your questions. I'm sorry I can't hear them, but it's been a great pleasure. Thank you. [applause]
THURSTON CLARKE: Thank you very much, that was great.
TOM PUTNAM: Thanks, Ted, it was great. I realized in my haste that I didn't mention the name of the book that Ted worked on so beautifully, Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy, which is a wonderful book, and Ted did all of the writing to put those secret tapes in context. So that's also available in our store.
THURSTON CLARKE: Highly recommend it. It was a wonderful resource for me, and I'm so happy that it got published just when I was still doing my research.
TOM PUTNAM: So we have microphones here. I hope there are some questions from the audience and let me give one shameless plug, which is to let you know that the de Kooning portrait that Thurston Clarke opens this new book with is actually on display in our Museum. So please come back and visit the Museum and see it. It's really quite a remarkable portrait. It's somewhat funny, though, it was for the Truman Library.
THURSTON CLARKE: I know!
QUESTION: Good evening. Thank you for that presentation. I enjoy coming to the Kennedy Museum because I'm a Roosevelt Democrat from Jersey City. I was an aerospace educator back in the '60s, and the vision that President Kennedy had of a multinational exploration of the moon would have been fantastic, of course. And to a great extent, his vision was realized not on the moon, but we have multinationals in our International Space Station today. So to a certain extent his vision has been realized.
But, of course, we have to recognize that back in '60 when he made his proposal, that it was really a race over rockets, Wernher von Braun being our rocketeer, bringing the military aspects of rocketry finally to America and never overshadowing Goddard, but bringing it here. And it was that rocket race that really would have prevented the merger of the two countries. But I think if we could have overcome that narrow-minded look at the world, we would have seen something really strong. And certainly in his second Administration, I think we would have seen perhaps that multinational on the moon.
THURSTON CLARKE: Kennedy did, on the other hand, not change his mind but he did go to the Kennedy Space Center a couple days before he goes to Dallas, and the Russians have sent kind of mixed signals about the joint. They haven't entirely responded the way he imagined, or they hadn't gotten around to it yet. There was a plan to have a summit with Khrushchev in 1964. Kennedy finally sees the rocket and stands underneath it, and he rocks back on his heels and, according to Hugh Sidey of Time magazine who was there, he keeps repeating to himself, saying to himself in a soft voice, "When this goes up, we'll be ahead of the Russians. When this goes up, we'll be ahead of the Russians." [laughter] So maybe the competitive Kennedy would have taken over again, I don't know.
QUESTION: And of course, the irony, if I may just make one last point, the Russians are the ones that are allowing us to go the shuttle now. Thank you.
THURSTON CLARKE: Yes, that's right. Thank you.
QUESTION: Perhaps the most surprising thing to me in your wonderful book was the revelation of the proposed, the efforts for détente with Castro. Of course, that fell in a black hole when the President died. But I wonder if you have any thoughts about if that is something that might have actually gone somewhere?
THURSTON CLARKE: Well, I was intrigued by it, too, because you have at the same time Kennedy approving the continuation of the sabotage program and Castro approving his sabotage program to send arms to the Communists in Venezuela to undermine the election, at the same time when they're having this conversation, through these third parties, through Lisa Howard of ABC and through the UN representative from Cuba and everything else.
But here's something. I didn't make this connection in the book, and I've just made it recently. Bobby Kennedy was also one of the intermediaries in this, was one of the ones who was talking to his brother about the Castro initiative which was being handled by Bill Attwood, who was a journalist who'd interviewed Castro and who was then on Stevenson's staff at the United Nations. Now, a couple of weeks, very close, I think it was December 9th, two or three weeks after Dallas, Bobby Kennedy sends this extraordinary memorandum to the State Department recommending that travel restrictions be dropped so that Americans can visit Cuba. And he says, "This is inconsistent with our traditions, our democracy. Also, it smacks of the Berlin Wall and what the Communists do and I recommend we immediately get rid of the travel ban on Cuba." Nothing happens to it. It's dismissed at a meeting to which he wasn't even invited to come and attend. As well, is what happens with the initiative, which is also – Attwood is finally told that Johnson hasn't got any interest in this right now in an election year.
But because Bobby was in the middle of this whole Castro thing, I think it's revealing. I have nothing else but intuition to go on this -- that he would send that memorandum shortly after Dallas – that he wouldn’t try to do this if he didn't feel that this was something his brother would have done or was interested in doing, and didn't see it as a way of kind of promoting and continuing the possibility of, as has been said, turning Castro into the Tito of the Caribbean. So I think there might have been a connection there. I didn't make it in the book; it didn't occur to me until later.
QUESTION: Thank you very much.
THURSTON CLARKE: Sure.
QUESTION: Thank you for coming tonight. President Kennedy, you said he didn't have any combat troops in Southeast Asia or Vietnam, but he had the US Green Beret as advisors.
THURSTON CLARKE: Yeah.
QUESTION: During all your research, sir, do you have any written documents from President Kennedy stating that he would not commit any combat troops to Vietnam?
THURSTON CLARKE: What I have is conversations that he had with Mike Mansfield and with his brother. The fact that this -- sending combat troops -- was proposed to him on several occasions by Rostow, by I think it was the Rostow-McNamara visit to Vietnam, and that Kennedy, in each instance, did not take their advice and refused to send combat troops to Vietnam, even though he was told at one point by McGeorge Bundy that unless he sent combat troops to Vietnam that the South probably couldn't survive. So that's the evidence. He never signed a secret order saying "no combat troops." He just never sent them, and refused to send them when his advisors had recommended doing so.
QUESTION: My last question: Is there any sealed documents that may later in history let us know that maybe there's something written?
THURSTON CLARKE: I think I'm going to defer to Tom Putnam on that one! I'm not aware of it, but maybe there's a …
TOM PUTNAM: Certainly if they were there, they would have been found by now. So I think it's unlikely.
QUESTION: Okay, thank you.
TOM PUTNAM: Any other questions from the audience? Let me perhaps suggest then the last one, which is simply comparing your two books. You looked at John F. Kennedy writing his inaugural address and the beginning of his presidency, and now you've carried it through the arc of his life. What's the difference between the man that you studied in your first book and the man that you write about here in the second?
THURSTON CLARKE: Well, I think the inaugural address had a lot about peace and negotiations in it. In fact, the headlines in the newspapers the next day, a lot of the headlines were "Kennedy's Peace Speech." Apparently, people weren't quite as enamored with the "pay any price, bear any burden line," or didn't think it was as important as it's later become. So I think that there was this desire to settle the Cold War, to have negotiations. He has the line, "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate." Well, finally he does that in '63.
But I think the difference is, and I mention this in the book, Robert Frost was supposed to read a poem that he'd written for the inauguration and the last line was going to be, "a golden age of poetry and power, of which this noonday's the beginning hour." He couldn't read it because the typescript was very faint and the sun glare off the snow banks kind of blinded him. So he recited a poem. But he came to the White House two days later and gave Kennedy a copy of the poem that he had written for the occasion. I can't remember if he read it to Kennedy or Kennedy read it with that line at the end about poetry and power. And as Frost left, he said to Kennedy, "Be more Irish than Harvard. Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan age." And when Kennedy wrote a thank-you note to Frost for coming to the White House, there was a typed note, "Thank you very much," and at the bottom Kennedy scrawled in his own hand, "It's poetry and power all the way."
Well, it wasn't poetry and power quite all the way yet, but I think that in the final year, the final 100 days, he finally married the power of the presidency to the poetry of his words, and he never forgot what Frost had told him. We know that because in the end of October of '63, he went to dedicate the groundbreaking for the Frost Library at Amherst, and while he's there, in the remarks, he says, "Robert Frost once told me to be more Irish than Harvard, and I've tried to honor that." So it was a comment that obviously had lived with him.
TOM PUTNAM: Thank you all so much for coming. The book is on sale in our bookstore.
Thank you very much.
THURSTON CLARKE: Thanks. [applause]
THE END