August 3-30, 1965, Washington D.C.
asey died July 30, 1965, a Friday. It wasn’t until the next week, C on Tuesday morning, that Ken laid the single sheet of paper, with no accompanying stack, on a corner of his boss’s desk.
“I’m so very sorry, Sir.” he said, as he backed toward the door.
“I’ll be right outside the door if you need me.” He pulled the door closed as Kennedy reached for the sheet of paper.
Kennedy studied the paper for a few seconds, then his jaw went slack, he dropped the paper and his face fell into his hands, where it stayed for ten seconds. In those ten seconds he thought first about the things he might have done to pull Casey from danger, things within his power to have done, things he thought many times about doing, but which he had always decided not to do because Casey would have known of, and resented, Kennedy’s meddling. He next turned his thoughts to his pads, thinking, for one brief, redemptive moment, that his pads could undo the harm; better a resentful Casey than none at all. Even as the thought formed, however, he realized the pads held no power to undo things already done, and indeed the pads may have no power at all, as he’d made no progress in understanding how to use them. With that, he had thought himself into a corner, from which there was no escape from the realization of how 191
badly he had botched things up, than to react to the feeling of powerlessness by exploding.
He swore and kicked furniture, stomped about the office, pulled at his hair and screamed that he should have known, should have done something. The tirade lasted nearly ten minutes. When, after fifteen minutes of silence, Ken ventured into the Oval Office, he found a shaken and brooding Kennedy sitting behind his desk.
When he heard Ken enter, he roused himself and told Ken he would be in the residence. Ken was to cancel his appointments and see that he was not disturbed.
The Kennedys had spent the previous weekend in Hyannis Port. Jackie and the children had stayed there with his parents, extending their weekend for a few days, which was fortunate, or perhaps not, as having his family there in the Executive Residence might have made it difficult for JFK to begin drinking, and continue drinking, for the next several days.
Ken knew it might be a mistake to intervene between JFK and Jackie, but he felt it would be right to give the president a few days to recover from what obviously was a great personal loss. He explained this to Jackie, by telephone, and convinced her to stay away for a while longer. When, the following Friday, August 6, Jackie learned JFK would not join her in Hyannis Port, she decided she must act. She called Ken to let him know she would arrive in Washington early the next morning. The children stayed on for the weekend and would return to DC that Sunday, with Bobby and Ethel.
When she walked into the Executive Residence at 09:30 Saturday morning, August 7, Jackie had prepared for anything, so she was pleasantly surprised to find Jack sitting up in bed, sipping coffee, and reading.
“Good morning, stranger,” she said, walking across the room.
“Good morning yourself, beautiful,” Jack said, as Jackie sat on the side of the bed and turned to face him. “Coffee’s hot,” he added, indicating the service on the nightstand. She stood and poured a cup, then resumed her perch on the side of the bed.
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She took a sip and said, “Ken warned you I was coming?”
“That he did, last evening. Good timing though. I was done wallowing in self-pity. Was up early today, got the staff to clean in here, and started catching up on briefings.” He indicated the sheaf of papers held in his left hand.
“Jack, I’m so sorry about Casey. There was nothing you could have done. You know that, don’t you?”
“I know. It’s just… I thought I’d see him again. Thought… I don’t know, maybe after this term, I’d get him involved somehow, in whatever comes next. He… He was here, you know? Last night?
Woke up and there he was, just off to your left. In uniform, had a duffle bag over his shoulder. I asked him where he was going and he said that information was on a need-to-know-basis. I told him I had made no sense out of the legal pads yet, and he said I wasn’t ready yet. I asked when I would be ready, and he said, ‘Depends on how long it takes to pull your head out of your ass.’ Can you imagine that? He told me to pull my head out of my ass.”
Jackie thought for a moment, then said, cautiously, “I guess I could imagine it. You obviously did.”
“Right?” she asked, when Jack didn’t reply.
“Um, oh, right, that must be it. I imagined it. Or, maybe it was a dream. It just, you know… seemed so real.”
“Such is the nature of dreams.”
“Right. Right again. Thanks, by the way, for giving me the time. I didn’t accomplish anything, but I needed to work through it alone.”
“You can thank Ken for talking me into it,” Jackie replied.
“I already have. He’ll come in tomorrow. We’ll have work to do on my schedule. The kids aren’t here until tomorrow either, I hear? We’ve got today off. What do you want to do?”
She sets her coffee cup on the tray, reaches across him, and removes the papers from his left hand.
Mid way through the following week, JFK has a few minutes alone in the Oval Office. His next meeting is a one-on-one with a 193
Democratic senator from the deep south, one who has indicated his reluctance in supporting the equal rights legislation JFK wants to pass. JFK opens his case and removes pad #1. He thinks he will peruse it for a few minutes, since he has the time. He hasn’t confronted a pad since before Casey died, two weeks ago, and he isn’t thinking of any specific issue, except perhaps, Casey himself.
He establishes his meditative state and is surprised he doesn’t whisk off to some weird or horrid future scape. Instead, he recalls a conversation he’d overheard two years ago, during a meeting with campaign staff. There were a dozen people in the room that day, and someone behind him mentioned that his son played little league ball with the grandson of the very senator Kennedy will meet in a few minutes. He’d forgotten the tiny snippet of information, but he can now recall it word for word. He sets the pad aside and is still puzzling over the mundane nature of the revelation when the Senator arrives in his office.
Kennedy had planned to waste no time getting to the point of the meeting. However, after the handshake and greeting, without having planned to, he asks after the senator’s grandson, even refers to him by name. The senator is delighted to tell the president about his grandson, and how he overcame an early childhood ailment which had threatened to cripple him.
When the meeting ends twenty minutes later, they haven’t spoken of the equal rights legislation at all. The senator simply told the president he had changed his mind, will vote for the legislation, and they had spent the rest of the meeting talking about children and grandchildren.
Kennedy walks the senator to the door, bids him farewell, and asks Evelyn to hold his calls for a few minutes. He closes the door, walks behind his desk, and stands looking at the chair the senator had just vacated. He replays the entire conversation, commits it to memory. He goes back over the experience he’d had with the legal pad just before the senator arrived. Then he records the entire sequence of events in a journal he is keeping for just that purpose.
When he finishes, he feels he can reproduce his precise state of 194
mind from the last pad session, every nuance of thought, every sub-tlety of emotion.
He understands what has just occurred. He recognizes the power he acquired by remembering an unimportant snippet of conversation that had taken place years before, and he further acknowledges that his legal pad allowed him to pull that memory forth from the depths of his subconscious. He savors the simple elegance of what just happened, plays it over in his mind: the pad-triggered memory, leading to the easy capitulation of a difficult opponent.
Heart pounding, he realizes this is the breakthrough he’s been searching for, and further, this new technique is what Casey tried to explain to him two years ago, just before Christmas. Casey does not magically appear in Kennedy’s office to offer congratulations, though Kennedy would welcome the apparition. He’d appreciate the opportunity to tell Casey he has finally done it, pulled his head out of his ass.
Aware time is wasting, he forces himself to calm, takes a deep breath, and begins what he believes will be a new chapter in the odyssey he’s been traveling since that day in Dallas. He glances at the schedule for his next meeting, reaches for his case and withdraws his legal pad. A short ninety seconds later, he announces to his secretary he is open for business. For a moment, Evelyn thought she noticed a difference in Kennedy’s voice. She would think back upon that moment, in the weeks and months and years that followed, and wonder.
Late one evening several weeks later, long after Jackie has turned out her light and fallen asleep, Kennedy has finished his required reading, and he reaches for his special case, intending to enter a session with the third page of legal pad #1. The first two pages seem used up, or surpassed, perhaps, in that history has progressed beyond the point where they are relevant any longer. A waste, he knows, opportunities he may never see again. He won’t dwell on that. He can hardly wait to see the new opportunities each day will bring.
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In reaching for his case he notices the time and decides it is too late, and he is too tired. He turns out his light, and as is usually the case, he lies awake thinking for nearly an hour before he’s able to dial his mind down to a level that allows sleep.
He thinks of the past five weeks, during which he’s enjoyed a dozen minor successes just like the one late last August involving the senator. Casey’s advice regarding his method with the pads has proven its worth. He is giddy over the possibilities, but he keeps himself well grounded, focused on tiny steps, determined never again to stray from that ideal.
If he is merely thinking, however, without a legal pad in his hands, he can allow his mind to wander further afield, consider a larger picture, a longer time frame. Tonight, he finds himself contemplating the world and its many problems. He thinks of how complicated the world became with the emergence of Homo sapiens as the dominant species. Before that, life was simple. Brutal, cruel even, but simple. The strong survived and the weak were eaten.
When the intellect of man develops beyond the rudimentary, he at some point envisions the concept of life free from threat. It logically follows that he also should not kill, at least within his own species. He retains however the capacity to kill, for even though peace is occasionally won, it is never universal, and it is always short lived. Man is motivated to keep his fighting skills well honed.
He declares himself the only species capable of “higher thought,” enabling him to ponder such abstract notions as Liberty, Country, Pride, Revenge, Hate, Love and Greed. It is unfortunate, but understandable, to man, that he must append those notions to the list of excuses that occasionally make killing acceptable, unavoidable, commendable, or the least adverse of the alternatives. In a sense, man is as a virus that knows no other way to exist.
He speaks often of peace, does man, and in his heart of hearts he truly wants peace, pines for it, so fiercely in fact that he will kill for it. Therein lies his dilemma, for while it is easy to envision the concept of not killing at a future time, once peace has been secured, (on his terms, of course) as a practical matter it is most difficult to 196
find that point in a dispute when man can agree upon peace, permanent, and for all time.
What if all the excuses man uses to justify war and killing didn’t exist? Foolish question, naïve, a part of him knows. Still, if it were possible, under ideal conditions, to eliminate one of the many reasons man wars, which of those reasons might most easily be eliminated? Preposterous, he thinks, to consider the term “easily”
in this context, but as he needn’t tell a soul of the simple-minded thought, he’ll suffer no scorn for thinking it up.
Kennedy finally succumbs to sleep. In stolen moments of his busy schedule in the next few days, he continues to consider the issue, and comes to a startling conclusion: the basic needs of food, water and territory is his answer.
The earth, he knows, possesses all three commodities in abundance far beyond need. He understands the economic and practical obstacles to the simple redistribution of those commodities, and he recognizes redistribution as merely a stopgap measure. The challenge is how to marshal world resources, and man’s inventiveness, into a well-orchestrated effort designed to render the earth’s populations free from hunger or thirst; able to grow food and find water themselves, or able to pay for those things in sufficient quantity as to erase want.
He considers the vast amounts of money, determination, and engineering that would be required for such an endeavor, and he is at first despondent. Then he realizes how these requirements pale compared to the requirements for those same resources needed to build a modern skyscraper, or aircraft carrier, or send a man to the moon, and he is rejuvenated.
Yes, the world can feed all its children, it just must want to badly enough. If we elevate that objective, bring it to the top of the list, ahead of the next nuclear submarine; if we apply the enthusiasm to build the next sport stadium to ending hunger; we would surely succeed. The trick will be in cajoling the world into not only accepting, but passionately embracing, this rearrangement of its priorities.
That will be only a start. To eliminate war, to have even a 50-197
50 chance, a condition must exist where there is nothing to gain from war. Humans want. They will always want. If they get, they will want more. Quality of life, health, and opportunity must improve until they are equal, or nearly so, worldwide. It seems detractive of humans, that they will stop making war only when they already have everything they could take from a neighbor, but there it is, human nature; truth. Kennedy doesn’t think he can change it, so he’ll learn to work with it.
Quite a daunting task, he thinks, feeding the world, eliminating war; challenges that have defied leaders throughout recorded history. However, none before him have ever possessed a tool the likes of his legal pads.
Interesting. He’s never considered the possibility that at one or more times in the past, a contrivance akin to his legal pads may have existed. If so, it failed, obviously, considering the current state of Earthly affairs. This renders him disheartened again, as though he may become the latest in a long line of leaders who, even with a gift from the great beyond, have failed humanity. However, he allows negativity to darken his mood only briefly, chooses instead to believe that the aforementioned possibility serves him well, providing even more reason to stay grounded, keep his eye on the ball, concentrate on tiny steps. Damn-it Casey, if only you’d browbeaten me until I saw the light, I wouldn’t have wasted nineteen months, and you might still be here.
One thought nags at Kennedy: the need to war and kill inspired many of humankind’s greatest advancements. Would humankind still be able to think, to innovate, if motives for killing no longer exist?
That night, as Kennedy prepares to turn out his light, it occurs to him that even if he succeeds beyond his wildest dreams, even if he should accomplish all the tasks set before him, it could all come to naught if he fails to eliminate the one cause of war that defies reason, the one that may still exist after every other cause has been removed, the one with a need that may never be satisfied.
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