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Overview
Written by a prize-winning historian and biographer of such giants as Winston S. Churchill and Douglas MacArthur, this intimately detailed account provides a rare personal glimpse into the emotions behind the Kennedy administration—from the elation of victory to the frustrating challenges facing a young president at a pivotal turning point in US history.
Originally published in 1962—before the assassination of JFK—Portrait of a President is William Manchester’s first biography of the thirty-fifth president of the United States. In addition to firsthand encounters with JFK, the biography draws from over forty interviews conducted in the first year of his presidency. In speaking with those closest to the commander-in-chief, both in his administration and his family, Manchester captures a complete portrait of one of the most highly regarded figures of the twentieth century.
This edition includes a new introduction and epilogue written by Manchester in the aftermath of November 1963, adding to the mythos by documenting not just how President Kennedy lived, but also the legacy he left behind.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780795350375 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | RosettaBooks |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 286 |
| Sales rank: | 98,731 |
| File size: | 467 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
You Must Never Forget
The White House is very white. Under a roving moon its freshly painted sandstone walls gleam through Andrew Jackson's beloved magnolias with a haunting, ghost-candle glow, and the barbered lawn lies quiet as a park, and sometimes, when the light shifts, the mansion seems to recede. Partly this is a trick of landscaping, partly it is us. So much intrudes. Americans take their Presidency personally. In retrospect you recall pledges of allegiance in chalkdusty classrooms, and blue eagles, and Hoover's medicine ball, and Raymond Massey in that odd hat, and Carl Sandburg writing of the day the calendar said Good Friday —
The oaks and chestnuts stood grave and thoughtful.
From any window of the honorable Executive Mansion they were above reproach. ...
Did any clairvoyant foreteller write a forecast that today, this April the Fourteenth, one man must hear a deep sea bell and a farewell gong and take a ride skyward swifter than Elijah in the chariot of fire?
Thus mythbound, you lurk behind the old black iron fence on Pennsylvania Avenue, squinting at the floodlit north façade. The haze of tribal sentiment grows denser. You can scarcely believe that the shrine is inhabited.
It is, because the White House is also a house. The lower rooms lack domesticity — each year over a million tourists file through them under the illusion that they are seeing the President's lodgings, when all they are in is a museum — but when a concealed elevator rises to the second floor above ground level you emerge in the First Family's residential apartment, and there the tone is quite different. This suite is closed to the public; no part of it was shown on CBS's Jacqueline Kennedy Show. It is very much a home, though not all the public would recognize it as such, because it is so precisely upper-class. The last tenantswere comfortably middle-class. Their tastes ran to the music of Fred Waring and Lawrence Welk; to color television sets, red leather chairs, war trophies. Today the only martial note among the furnishings is the photograph of the First Lady's father wearing a World War I second lieutenant's uniform, and even he gazes out from his frame with genteel, East Egg urbanity.
The new look is subdued elegance. Achieving it was no mean accomplishment. The mansion has changed enormously since the days when John G. Nicolay called it "a dirty, rickety concern," yet it can scarcely be called a triumph of design. Ceilings are lofty dustcatchers, rooms are chopped up, doors open inconveniently. Stepping from the elevator you find yourself in a small vestibule which debouches into a huge hall. This passage runs east and west, bisecting the entire floor like a concourse and creating something of a traffic problem. The President's oval study opens on it from the south, and so — directly across from the elevator — does his bedroom. The children sleep along the north side. The western extremity of the corridor has been converted into a family sitting room, which leads to the First Lady's bedroom and the dining room. This arrangement is successful, but eastward the yawning hall ends in splendid anticlimax. The state bedrooms are down there. In them, theoretically, eminent guests from other nations may retire to enjoy an enticing view of the Treasury next door. Actually celebrities board in Blair House, and the state rooms, always vacant, somehow evoke memories of a resort hotel out of season.
The effect could easily be that of a refurbished New York elevator flat. It's not, because the great, barnlike corridor has been toned down by an ingenious use of color, objets d'art, and graceful furniture. Slipcovered French chairs are grouped invitingly on off-white rugs. Lovely chandeliers sparkle overhead. American paintings by George Catlin, Maurice Prendergast, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent hang on tinted walls, and below them are handsomely mounted vases and sculptures, a Louis Quinze desk, and a spinet. The most vivid hues, however, come from book jackets. Altogether there are several thousand volumes, rising in endless tiers: graceful books on art, squat histories, multi-volume encyclopedias, Churchill's memoirs, a few modern novels — Nevil Shute's On the Beach, Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird — and many biographies, including a battered, jacketless copy of Profiles in Courage, which seems a shabby orphan here, because everything else is tidy and quietly expensive. The hi-fi-FMTV in the west sitting room is long, low, masked. The portable bar there is stocked with Beefeater gin and Ballantine's Scotch ("She hath done what she could," read the fatalistic banner which the W.C.T.U. gave the mansion in memory of Mrs. Rutherford B. "Lemonade Lucy" Hayes). White matchbooks bear the gold inscription The President's House, and the spine of a buckram scrapbook the simple legend Caroline.
* * *
Caroline's father approaches with celerity, shoulders hunched and burnished black shoes gliding in a Boston social gait. His dress conforms to the decor: a tailored two-button navy blue suit, a white shirt with a spread collar, a narrow Ivy tie held by a gold alligator-grip clasp shaped like a tiny PT boat. Like many public men he seems shorter than his photographs, and startlingly older. On television he looks younger than his age, but forty million screens are wrong. The figure tapers like a boxer's; the glossy hair is chestnut, with only a suggestion of gray at the temples. The face, however, is deeply lined, especially around the mouth, and the eyes give an even stronger impression of maturity. They are opaque, gray, and often hooded by long lashes. There is about them an air of being withdrawn, as John Hay wrote of Lincoln, into "an inner sanctuary of thought, sitting in judgment on the scene and feeling its far reach into the future." It is impossible to read John Fitzgerald Francis Kennedy's mind, but obviously there is much on it. Upon the evening of this visit he has been President of the United States nearly a year.
"Let's go in here." (The familiar, starchy he-ah.) He moves past his bedroom door, toward the formal, yellow-walled oval study which looks out on the Washington Monument, and opening the door he precedes his visitor. This is protocol. Over four hundred indignant letters have inquired of the White House why the President always seems to be a few steps ahead of his wife. "Jackie," he once replied lightly, "will just have to walk faster." Actually she's not allowed to. The President outranks everyone, including ladies. On Cape Cod, or in Virginia or Florida, Jacqueline goes first at his insistence, but in the capital that's out. Early in his administration he tried to hold a door for Eleanor Roosevelt. She hung back.
"No, you go first," she said. "You are the President."
He laughed. "I keep forgetting."
"But you must never forget," Mrs. Roosevelt said gently.
He remembers now. We sit in the study — he in his upholstered Northern Porch rocker, a duplicate of the one downstairs in his West Wing office — and he reflects on the changes which the Presidency has wrought in his life.
"In eleven weeks I went from senator to President, and in that short space of time I inherited Laos, Cuba, Berlin, the nuclear threat, and all the rest. It was a terrific adjustment to make. I've made it now, but naturally there have been some changes. It's certainly true that I'm more isolated socially. In the beginning I tried to carry on the life I had led, going out, seeing people; but I soon realized that was impossible. Apart from state dinners I suppose I see only three or four people socially. But I have no feeling of withdrawing. After all, everyone's life is circumscribed. And in many ways I see and hear more than anyone else."
His right hand, which is never still — it almost seems to have a life of its own — drums on a matchbook, on the rocker arm, on a shaving scar, on his teeth. His eyes are hooded. For a long moment the only sounds are the rhythmic rock of the chair and the muted tick of a gold mantel clock behind him.
Then:
"So much depends on my actions. So I am seeing fewer people, simplifying my life, organizing it so that I am not always on the edge of irritability."
The hand makes a sudden, spastic fist.
Talking with writers is one of the President's relaxations, and presently he does relax, speaking with clarity and wit about his early life, his family, the war years, the years in Congress, and his rise to the most powerful office in the world. It is a pleasant evening. Yet beneath us the oaks and chestnuts stand grave and thoughtful. Every hour in the Executive Mansion is an hour in history. In South Vietnam tonight Communist guerrillas are attacking in battalion strength. In Algeria one O.A.S. threatens a putsch, while in South America another O.A.S. quibbles over Cuban sanctions. Andrei Gromyko is insisting that East Germans be given full control over Berlin access routes. London feels bullish about a new summit, Paris is grimly bearish, and Syria is seething. At home Jimmy Hoffa is celebrating his fourth anniversary as Teamster president, while the Senate Armed Services Committee has announced that it will hold hearings on Administration censorship of Pentagon brass. Housing, unemployment, and gold — each a code word for a knotty problem — have a brighter sound these days, thanks to vigorous executive action. There is still a ten per cent gap between the nation's productive capacity and its actual performance, however, and even the educators seem uninterested in education. The country as a whole feels sanguine, but there are many dissidents. Alfred Kazin is uneasy. Dwight Eisenhower is unhappy; so, even at this early date, is Roger M. Blough. The Americans for Democratic Action are most unhappy, and Margaret Chase Smith wonders aloud whether the author of Profiles lacks the courage to blow up the world.
Instinctively all these — and Gromyko, Macmillan, de Gaulle, and even Hoffa — turn to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It is the one place to which every buck is passed and where, as Harry Truman observed, the buck stops. Early in his tenure Kennedy had an imperfect understanding of this. At meetings of the National Security Council he would inquire of issues, "Let's see — did we inherit these, or are they our own?" It was Douglas MacArthur, of all people, who reminded him that the Presidency is a continuum. "The chickens are coming home to roost," the fading old soldier told him, "and you live in the chicken house." Ultimately every American problem becomes the President's. At the same time, the number of issues has multiplied. Because the world is more complex, and because this nation plays a larger role in it, the Chief Executive is empowered to make command decisions that were inconceivable twenty years ago, which means that Senator Smith's speech — whatever one thinks of her discretion — was directed to the right address.
To this address, to this home, and to its householder. The President must never forget, nor can he. More and more the discussion with his evening visitor turns to Germany, South America, domestic legislation, and the Soviet position on arms control, a problem so renitent that young John Kennedy analyzed it in his undergraduate thesis two decades ago. These quarters are en famille, but public life is never truly private once an ivory Princess telephone across the room rings. If a matter is urgent, any one of several aides or Cabinet ministers may call him at any hour. And once, as we stand by the blue and gold presidential flag, looking out at the winking red lights of the bone-white Monument, the President speaks of his Hairbreadth Harry mandate. "I've gone over the election hurdle," he says, his hand exploring in his hair. "Now I have the necessary support at home. This — this base is all-important. A chief of state cannot deal abroad effectively unless he has it. I'm over the hump now, but the first four months were delicate."
* * *
The early days of any Administration are vital, in the opinion of Columbia Professor Richard E. Neustadt, whose scholarly volume Presidential Power John Kennedy read during the 1960 campaign. Neustadt wrote that a Chief Executive's public image "takes shape for most constituents no later than the first time they see him being President (a different thing from seeing him as a candidate)." The first time Kennedy's constituents saw him as President he was at the post and pulling away. Noticing that there were no Negroes among the Coast Guard cadets in the inaugural parade, he started an official inquiry on the spot. The next morning he was in his bare office, witnessing the swearing in of his Cabinet, pumping Harry Truman's hand, and firing off Executive Order No. 1, to double the food rations of four million needy Americans. In the weeks which followed he continued to vibrate with energy. He would pace corridors, read on his feet, dictate rapidly, dart out for brisk constitutionals around the monument, and return in a sprint, snapping his restless fingers. "I never heard of a President who wanted to know so much," said Charles Bohlen. Some members of the government were so hard-pressed by the President that routine work suffered. A committee chairman from the Hill complained, "He may have two hours to spend, but I don't"; and Llewellyn Thompson, Ambassador to Russia, who was seldom alone with Eisenhower for more than ten minutes, had four two-hour sessions with Kennedy. The talk wasn't small talk. "When you see the President," a senator remarked, "you have to get in your car and drive like blazes back to the Capitol to beat his memo commenting on what you told him."
One day a hundred people were counted entering the West Wing office. One powwow there produced seventeen separate directives, and two months after taking the oath the new Chief Magistrate had issued thirty-two official messages and legislative recommendations — Eisenhower had issued five in his first two months — while delivering twelve speeches, promulgating twenty-two Executive Orders and proclamations, sending twenty-eight communications to foreign chiefs of state, and holding seven press conferences. A Washington wag observed that the new President seemed determined to be not only his own Secretary of State, but his own Mrs. Roosevelt, too. No detail seemed too small for him. Noting that Army guerrillas had been deprived of their green berets, he ordered that they be returned. Conferring with generals about Southeast Asian strategy, he tested the carbines being shipped to Saigon, and as his first presidential spring approached he even detected crab grass on the greening White House lawn and told the gardeners to get rid of it.
Some of his early activity was an extension of the inaugural binge: being President was fun. Some of it was a carryover from three years of incessant barnstorming: he was still behaving like a nominee. And some was a natural consequence of his appetite for work. Both John and Bobby Kennedy had spent most of their Washington years toiling at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue; they were genuinely amazed to learn that all executive offices shut down Saturdays. The Attorney General sent a note of appreciation to everyone who had worked in the Justice Building on the Administration's first Washington's Birthday, and the President ordered Saturday office hours for his staff to set a good (if vain) example for the rest of the government.
But the hatless, coatless, on-the-ball vigor also had a shrewd political motive. Kennedy was out to expand that all-important base. The people he needed were watching him, and he wanted to be sure they liked what they saw. Americans approve of self-starters. Thus it was helpful for reporters to report that the new President was very much in charge and was encumbered by piles of documents and swarms of advisers; useful for the word to be passed that Dean Acheson had been given just four days to hammer out a detailed NATO report. The first, televised press conferences were, of course, crucial. One of them — the third — was watched by some sixty-five million people in twenty-one and a half million homes. These performances were live. Kennedy had to be not only his own Mrs. Roosevelt, but also his own Robert Montgomery. Bearing down in his best IBM manner, he became something of his own Mnemosyne as well; reporters learned that the President knew all about the sale of a surplus Navy building in West Virginia and could quote from memory a statistic aboutCuban molasses which had appeared four days earlier near the end of a government report.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Portrait of a President"
by .
Copyright © 1990 William Manchester.
Excerpted by permission of RosettaBooks.
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Table of Contents
Introduction to the First Edition,
Introduction to This Edition,
ONE You Must Never Forget,
TWO The Establishmentarian,
THREE Sort of Sideways,
FOUR Flat Out, All Out,
FIVE Himself,
Epilogue,