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January 1963: Mary Meyer badgers JFK to do more for the poor
By
Published: Jul 09, 2020
Category:
Fiction
In January, I published a fact-based novel, JFK and Mary Meyer: A Love Story. It was a reimagining of the diary that Kennedy’s only serious lover kept during his presidency. A year after his assassination, she was murdered as she took her daily walk on the towpath in Georgetown. Ben Bradlee, her brother-in-law, burned her diary.
The book got an enthusiastic review in the Sunday Times Book Review. Then the virus arrived, book events stopped, and I put all thoughts of Mary Meyer away. Black Lives Matter and a welcome conversation about income inequality made me curious: What did JFK think about minorities and the pool? Might Mary — an idealist with a willingness to speak bluntly, even to the President? — have influenced his thinking?
I opened my book for the first time in months. I found this. Remember, it’s fiction.
JANUARY 22, 1963
I read Dwight Macdonald’s review in The New Yorker of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America.”
50 pages!
Must be the longest review the magazine ever published.
I asked Jack if he had read it.
Of course.
He said he marked the passages he thought were key, and asked me to mark my copy, and then we’d compare.
Did he also ask Jackie to do this?
Doubtful — poverty is of no interest to her.
What I marked:
11% our population is non-white. 25% of our poor are.
40-50 million Americans — 25% of the population, are now living in poverty. Real poverty. Like not getting enough to eat.
8 million “senior citizens” — that’s 50% of them — live in poverty.
1 million have less than $580 a year.
1/3 have no phone.
You’d think it’s better in the North but it’s not.
1959: ¼ of all New York families were below the poverty line ($4,000).
“The left-behinds have so long accepted poverty as their destiny that they need outside help to climb out of it.”
To this point, we marked the same stuff. Only I marked the rest:
“The federal government is the only purposeful force — I assume wars are not purposeful — that can reduce the numbers of the poor and make their lives more bearable.”
“To do something about this hard core, a second line of government policy would be required; namely, direct intervention to help the poor. We have never accepted the principle that every citizen should be provided, at state expense, with a reasonable minimum standard of living regardless of any other considerations.”
“The problem is obvious: the persistence of mass poverty in a prosperous country. The solution is also obvious: to provide, out of taxes, the kind of subsidies that have always been given to the public schools (not to mention the police and fire departments and the post office)—subsidies that would raise incomes above the poverty level.”
I asked Jack: What are you going to do about it?
He said he recently signed a law that provides $5 million this fiscal year for daycare.
I asked: For how many children?
– About 4 million.
– $1.25 for each kid! That’s nothing!
– The best I could do!
– What’s the federal budget?
– $740 billion.
– No room to do better?
He counted off his priorities on his fingers: slums, hunger, inadequate medical care.
– You have to do better for working mothers and their kids.
– I did better already.
– When?
– My first Executive Order.
I didn’t remember.
– The day after the inauguration I increased surplus food for poor Americans.
– Good! Do it again! Do more!
– With what money?
– Taxes!
– They’re plenty high now.
– Tax a little more.
– What’s your tax rate, Mary?
I didn’t know.
– Because whatever it is, you can pay it. You don’t even have to think about it.
I couldn’t drop it: What if you reduced spending on defense and promoted peace?
– A great President is a wartime President.
– You believe that?
– Look at the record.
– So… you’d start a war?
– You don’t have to start a war. They have a nasty way of coming to you.
– Like Vietnam?
– Vietnam will go away.
– If you make it go away.
– Not the year before an election.
– You can step back. You can say no.
He waved, like at an annoying insect: And you can leave.
I bristled: It’s like that?
He pointed to the door: Feel free….
I left.
Was this a conversation with consequences — perhaps fatal consequences? Let’s turn now to February, 1964. Three months after JFK’s assassination. A LIFE Magazine writer comes to see Mary. Again, the facts are the facts. The conversation is fiction.
– You keep a diary?
– Yes.
– A record of your time with Kennedy?
– Of course not!
– Too bad. Early October of ’62 and early January of ’63 would have been good times to hear him talk about the politics of taking a $300 million bite from Texas oilmen so he could help the poor and elderly.
– I’ll look.
Later, she does. And finds this: I pressed Jack about funding for federal efforts to help the elderly and the poor.
There are other subjects Mary cared about and may have caused JFK to care about. Could she have contributed to his death? Could she have made her murder a simple matter of house-cleaning? Good questions. And good reason to ask now: Why is so little being done for the poor, minorities and the elderly?
