The Fading Light of Camelot

A week after Kennedy became President, he was handed a report on South Vietnam. Speed-reading, he was heard to mutter, “This is going to be the worst one yet.”

By summer, Kennedy was under increasing pressure to make greater commitments to shore up South Vietnam. Introduce American combat troops, he was told by the Joint Chiefs, the State Department, and the C.I.A. Kennedy resisted, looking for less dangerous ways to intervene. He ordered his newly appointed “Military Representative,” former Army Chief of Staff, Maxwell Taylor, to go to Vietnam to assess the situation. Here is the October 13, 1961, letter which sent Taylor marching.

I would like your views on the courses of action which our Government might take at this juncture to avoid a further deterioration in the situation in South Viet-Nam…

Departing a hawk, Maxwell came back only more hawkish. Kennedy’s first instincts were, it turned out, his best: Vietnam was downhill all the way. His mission to Taylor, was the first step of the descent.

At eight o’clock on the evening of June 11, 1963, President Kennedy, in a nationally televised speech from the Oval Office, called for the end of race-based discrimination and the full and complete integration of the nation’s “Negro” minority into the nation’s life. The issue was a moral one, he said, as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution. Congress needed to enact, as soon as possible, sweeping legislation that would finally guarantee equal rights and equal opportunities to all Americans. But as much as that speech marked such a turning point in American history, it changed nothing when, just four hours later, a Ku Klux Klansman in Mississippi ambushed and killed a civil rights activist, Medgar Evers. This letter, written on the same day – June 12, 1963 – Evers bled to death in front of his wife and children, in front of his own home, is the first draft of Kennedy’s powerfully felt response.

Although comforting thoughts are difficult at a time like this…Achievement of the goals he did so much to promote will enable his children and the generations to follow to share fully and equally in the benefits and advantages our Nation has to offer.

In Berlin’s Rudolph Wilde Platz on June 26, 1963, millions gathered to hear President Kennedy defiantly proclaim that in their struggle against communism, he too was a Berliner. To a clapping, waving, crying, cheering three-fifths of Berlin’s population, Kennedy – having viewed for himself the wall splitting the city in half – declared that “in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’” That exhilarating triumph was the apogee, many believe, of his presidency – and now ranks as the greatest speech, ever, by an American president on foreign soil.  In this July 8, 1963 letter, he graciously thanks the American military command in Europe for the success of his visit.

I am well aware of the sensitivity and the complexity of the many requirements placed upon the members of your command…That you and they fulfilled these requirements so willingly and efficiently is a source of great satisfaction… Please relay to the members of your command my good wishes and my appreciation for their support during my visit.  You have, of course, my most grateful personal thanks.

The Kennedys were a competitive lot, and their chief form of relaxation, exertion. If it involved internecine rivalry, so much the better. Solitary pursuits were generally shunned. When young bride Jacqueline Kennedy bought her husband a paint set for Christmas ’53, all the Kennedys descended on it, competing to see who could produce the most paintings in the shortest amount of time. Jacqueline was appalled: her idea had been to allow Jack to emulate his hero, Winston Churchill, who found painting a serene distraction from political pressure. Kennedy took up painting, by himself, that spring, and when, a year later, he was recovering from back surgery, he painted even more. Kennedy painted mostly seascapes. This painting, dated 1955, is of the Kennedy’s Palm Beach house.

Dot Turbridy, the young Irish widow of a riding champion – Captain Michael Turbridy – was befriended by the Kennedys, and spent some time visiting them in Palm Beach. She became, it was said, like an Irish cousin to the family – and when President Kennedy traveled to Ireland in 1963, she was with his party every step of the way.

The death of a child, at any age, is unbearable – and Kennedy’s anguish at losing his new-born son was terrible. Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was born prematurely on August 7, 1963, and died just 39 hours later; President Kennedy was with him.

Five days after his death, the President writes his sister-in-law Ethel’s brother George and his wife Pat, on August 14, 1963, to thank them for their message of condolence. It was “a comfort”, he says, “to me and my family.”

Kennedy was not a man who showed emotion readily. But in the days surrounding Patrick’s death, he was seen weeping on three occasions; alone, after the boy’s death; when telling his bedridden wife about the ordeal; and at the funeral, so “overwhelmed with grief,” Cardinal Cushing recalled, “that he literally put his arm around the casket as though he was carrying it out.”

The day before President Kennedy died, he dedicated the Aerospace Medical Health Center at Brooks Air Force Base. Looking at an experimental oxygen chamber that simulated air pressure, he asked if it could lead to knowledge, on how to keep premature babies alive.

If it had rained that morning; if Jacqueline Kennedy had not been with him; if the crowds to greet them hadn’t been so deep, slowing down the limo; or if the driver, hearing shots, had sped up and not down – those were the variables. Had any one of them been different then, perhaps, this edition of the November 22nd, 1963, Dallas Morning News might not have been, in all likelihood, the last thing signed by the 35th President of the United States before he was shot and killed, riding with his wife in an open limousine in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 p.m., that Friday noon.

One thousand days in office, and Kennedy was worried that the backlash from the Civil Rights issue would cost him the South.  He would need Texas, and by more than the margin he’d squeaked by with in ’60.  The plan was to fly to Texas, make half a dozen appearances, and end the visit on November 22nd, 1963, dinner for the State Democratic Executive Committee in Austin.

On the afternoon of the 22nd, as President Kennedy rode in an open limousine in Dallas, three shots rang out from a nearby building. One struck the president in the upper back and exited from his neck; another entered the rear of his head, exiting and shattering the right side of his skull. He was, effectively, dead at that moment, although death was not pronounced until an hour later – by which time 68% of all Americans had heard the news: the President had been assassinated.

This ticket to the “Texas Welcome Dinner” at 7:30 would, of course, never be used.  At 7:30 that night, a young man, suspected of murder, was paraded past a crowd of newsmen in City Hall. “Did you shoot the President?” a reporter asked Lee Harvey Oswald. “I didn’t shoot anybody,” he lied, “No sir.”

Here is the awful answer to the question President Kennedy, having his portrait taken, posed to the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt: “What will the passage of the next four years show in his revealing photo[s]–”?

Lyndon Johnson inscribes one of the most famous, and searing, of all American images:

With high regard and appreciation

Cecil Stoughton’s own iconic photo of Johnson taking the Oath of Office, November 22, 1963, aboard Air Force One at Love Field, Dallas Texas, as a dazed and bloodstained Jacqueline Kennedy stands at his side, staring ahead.

On November 22, 1963, the 35th President of the United States wrote his name across the front page of that day’s edition of the Dallas Morning News for a hotel chambermaid seeking an autograph. Beneath a headline declaring “Storm of Political Controversy Swirls Around Kennedy on Visit”, Kennedy scribbled, “To Jan White, John Kennedy.” Those five words were, in all likelihood, the last Kennedy would ever write; this famous headline of the next day’s edition of the Dallas Morning News explained why.

Congressman Dan Flood of Pennsylvania was old-school, and a letter from the President on his birthday, the sort of thing it was savvy to send him: he liked attention from On High. It would seem, then, that Kennedy took care to cover his eastern flank with this letter, and so signed and sent it to arrive with his “warmest congratulations” on Flood’s birthday, November 26th – which, that awful year, would be the day after Kennedy’s own funeral.

…I hope that this will be a happy and memorable occasion…