Once in a Great City Read online

  No unforgettable rhetoric or grand ideas were planned for this return trip. Upon arrival at Detroit Metropolitan Airport the night before, JFK declared that Michigan had “its best years ahead,” then spent a few hours in the hotel’s presidential suite granting audiences to local officials, including Mayor Cavanagh, a promising JFK disciple, and Police Commissioner Edwards, who was in the running for appointment to the federal bench. The suite was open for visitors again in the morning. First came Michigan’s governor, John Burley Swainson, who shared a story of World War II bravery with the naval hero president; Swainson had earned France’s Croix de Guerre at age nineteen after losing both legs in a land-mine explosion while fighting near Metz with the 95th Infantry, part of Patton’s army. He had won the statehouse on the ticket with JFK in 1960, but now his brief two-year term was in jeopardy as he trailed in polls against the Rambler man, George Romney, who had entered politics after making his name as president of American Motors Corporation, Detroit’s upstart car company.

  Soon a more intriguing guest carrying a bouquet of roses was ushered into the room, a lithe twenty-year-old dancer named Emese Szklenkay. The president took the young woman’s hand. “Glad to meet you. I’ve read about you in the papers,” he said. “How do you do?” Emese responded softly, in Hungarian. She had been with her Hungarian dance troupe performing in Paris two weeks earlier when she slipped away from her communist handlers, into freedom, an act of derring-do arranged by Michigan relatives and witnessed by a reporter from the Free Press. Detroit had an established Hungarian population centered in Delray, an industrialized section of the city’s southwest corner, not far from Bob Ankony’s neighborhood, that grew with a second wave of immigrants after the failed 1956 revolution. Emese asked the president to accept her roses as “a token of hope of the Hungarian people for freedom.” He took them and suggested that they pose for pictures. As she left the room, she turned back and wished Kennedy good luck, in English.

  A few minutes later, the president was striding out the Washington Boulevard entrance, smiling as he passed Raymond Murray, the rookie cop. Murray’s instructions had been to stand guard outside the hotel along with other officers assigned to the presidential detail and look for unusual activity in the area. He did not have a mobile radio. If anything came up, he would have to pass it along by word of mouth. There were no incidents, but one impression from that day stayed with him. As Murray scanned the cityscape from the hotel entrance, he kept thinking that “someone could easily shoot from one of the many tall buildings in the downtown area and kill the president.”

  The Cass Tech band, from the most illustrious public high school music program in a city of music, played the march song “Harvardiana” as Kennedy made his way to the speakers stand. Police Commissioner Edwards stood nearby. JFK seemed in a buoyant mood, noted Tom Wicker, who covered the White House for the New York Times and was on the press bus for the Midwest swing. Congress had just passed the Trade Expansion Act, sweeping legislation—to that point the administration’s most significant achievement—that started to break down long-standing tariff walls at home and abroad. The bill was on its way to the president for a signing ceremony in the Fish Room soon after JFK returned to Washington. He had made a point of calling it bipartisan, and in Detroit it had the support of two nationally powerful figures who were more often adversaries, Walter Reuther of the UAW and Henry Ford II of Ford Motor Company. Reuther was more sympathetic to free trade than many labor leaders. He called opponents of the Kennedy measure shortsighted, unable to see that it would lead to greater efficiencies of production and economic growth. But many Republicans had opposed it, and in his speech outside the Sheraton Cadillac, for the first time, Kennedy wielded the trade issue as a partisan weapon, saying, “A majority of the Republicans from this state, a majority of the Republican leadership, opposed our bill to make it possible for Detroit to sell cars in Europe.”

  The president chose a different angle of attack against Romney, who, like other car guys, as they called themselves, supported the trade expansion bill, believing it would be good for their industry. Armed with background memos from his political advisers, JFK understood that Romney was favored to defeat Swainson and that he would do so in a Democratic state by appealing heavily to independent voters. “One of the most interesting political phenomena of our times is to see Republican candidates in various states who run for office and say, ‘Elect the man,’ ” Kennedy told his Detroit audience. “You can’t find the word Republican on their literature, and I don’t blame them. But we write the word ‘Democrat’ in large letters because the Democratic party stands for progress.”

  It was a sun-splashed autumn morning, and Kennedy basked in the glow after his speech, at one point rising from the back of the parked presidential limousine, a 1963 white Lincoln Continental provided by Ford, and waving to the multitudes before he and Governor Swainson embarked on a twelve-mile zigzag through the Democratic heart of the city, mostly black and East European ethnic precincts. They rode up Cass and across to Woodward near the Fox Theater, then northward on Woodward past Wayne State University and the noble bookend edifices of the Detroit Institute of Arts and Detroit Public Library, all the way to the block-wide fortress of General Motors, topped with its Corinthian colonnade, another Albert Kahn legacy, turning right at East Grand and taking the boulevard across toward the Polish Catholic enclave of Hamtramck and up through the northeast side. Police officials estimated that as many as a hundred thousand people lined the route. Commissioner Edwards, who rode in a backup car, later described Kennedy’s reception in a letter to a friend in Washington, exclaiming that “the crowds which greeted him on the streets were the largest and most enthusiastic which I have ever seen since I first came to Detroit in 1936.” They seemed most effusive along Joseph Campau Street in Hamtramck, with another cluster awaiting the president’s arrival at City Airport, the small municipally owned field where JFK and his party would depart by helicopter for Flint and Muskegon.

  Raymond Brennan, an engineer in the trim department at Chrysler Corporation, was in the airport swarm along with his two boys, Terry and James. Twenty minutes earlier, they had watched the motorcade glide by on Woodward, then drove directly to the airport for another glimpse. When the caravan approached, they scrambled for a better view, climbing atop a narrow pipe that ran horizontally three feet aboveground next to a five-foot iron fence with ornamental spikes. They were leaning over the fence when the pipe buckled and broke under their weight, sending Brennan and one of his sons directly into the spikes, which pierced their ribs. With the crowd’s focus on JFK, no one noticed their predicament or heard their screams for about thirty seconds, a seeming eternity. Finally some spectators saw them and extricated them from the fence. Ambulances were arriving to take them to the hospital when the president’s helicopter disappeared on the horizon. By the time Kennedy got word of the incident, the Brennans were out of the hospital, recuperating at home. He sent them a note and autographed photos for the sons.

  Kennedy was much in demand in Detroit that fall. The plan was for him to return on November 1, five days before the election, for more campaigning. Henry Ford II had tried to lure him back before that for the opening of the Detroit Auto Show, but three visits to the city within a month were deemed too many by the White House political and scheduling staffs. They chose the campaign trips over the car show and offered Vice President Johnson to the auto group instead. This was a close call, since Ford, a lifelong Republican, seemed on the verge of coming over to the Kennedy side.

  Henry Ford II and JFK were the same age, both born in 1917. Ford was at Hotchkiss when Kennedy was at Choate; Ford was at Yale when Kennedy was at Harvard. The Manhattan upper-crust Catholic parents of Ford’s wife, Anne McDonnell, were friends of the Kennedys. Kathleen Kennedy, Jack’s closest sister, known as Kick, had been a bridesmaid at Henry and Anne’s wedding in 1940 (eight years before she died in a plane crash in France), and JFK once courted Anne’s sister, Charlotte McDonnell. Ford
told an oral historian later that he knew Kennedy so well that once, during a visit to the Oval Office, the president took him in a back room and showed him secret U-2 reconnaissance photos. So far during his presidency, Kennedy had called on Ford several times. Along with Reuther, he served on the president’s twenty-one-member labor-management advisory committee “to promote collective bargaining, industrial peace, sound wage and price policies and higher living standards.” During the summer of 1962, Kennedy had asked Lem Billings, his prep school roommate and first friend, to persuade Ford to lead a business committee to help fund a national cultural center in Washington, what later became the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Ford was already providing the White House with limousines on terms the president described in a thank-you letter as “a very favorable lease system” and now assigned the company’s top Washington lobbyist, Rod Markley, to do whatever the administration asked concerning the cultural center plans.

  Could Kennedy pry the best-known business executive in the country away from the Republicans? Ford had endorsed Romney, his industry rival, for governor, arguing that “after fourteen years of Democratic rule, with the UAW calling the shots, it’s about time we had a change.” But the presidency might be different. In a telegram earlier that year to Henry and Anne’s debutante daughter, Charlotte, who was celebrating her twenty-first birthday at the 21 Club in Manhattan, Kennedy noted wryly, “I hope you will count this an appropriate time to reconsider whatever political advice you may so far have received. Happy twenty-first birthday, John F. Kennedy.” Whether Kennedy knew it when he climbed into the helicopter at City Airport and whirled away from Detroit that noonday in October, the family advice Charlotte was receiving might have been more to his liking. Her father was thinking that he had “made a mistake with Jack” by not supporting him more openly. Not only did he enjoy Kennedy personally, but he was feeling optimistic about the country’s economic condition. After a downward turn from the midfifties, life seemed flush again in Detroit. At least the auto industry was back and booming.

  Chapter 3

  * * *

  THE SHOW

  THERE WAS THE show, but first there was the show before the show. First the car guys showed off to one another; then they showed their new cars to the public. The mood of the car guys depended on the excitement level of the public for their cars, and when their show before the show began on October 18, a Thursday evening, the prospects for the larger event, the 1962 Detroit Auto Show, seemed unparalleled.

  Nineteen sixty-two was rounding out as the second-best car year ever, and in October so far sales were moving at a faster pace than in any single month in history. The outlook for the next year was only better. Earlier that day, Ford boasted that it was increasing production over the next two months by twenty-eight thousand cars based on the record early sales of new models. General Motors sounded equally bullish, its factories in full gear. Chrysler was bringing back six hundred idled workers to boost output, and American Motors plants were humming six days a week, two shifts.

  The Motor City had an intoxicating buzz. The Today show was in town broadcasting live each morning with Hugh Downs and Jack Lescoulie, and NBC News was also preparing a prime-time Sunday special narrated by Chet Huntley. Look magazine, just reaching newsstands, had devoted its cover to the gleaming, wide-mouthed grilles of 1963 cars. Goodyear’s pug-nosed blimp was puttering overhead, a blinking billboard encouraging the local populace to make plans to see the show. Even the U.S. State Department was into boosterism, its chief of protocol encouraging foreign visitors to put Detroit on their itineraries. And here, at Ford Auditorium, the royal court of the automobile empire and related industry barons were gathering for a gala invitational concert featuring the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Detroit wanted to think of itself as a city of national and international stature, the center of the modern industrial world, and this was the celebration of its importance, the auto-culture variation of Hollywood’s Academy Awards, New York’s Fashion Week, and Washington’s White House Correspondents Dinner.

  The modernist Ford Auditorium, rising on the riverfront downtown off Jefferson Avenue, had been home to the orchestra since it opened in 1956. The name reflected its genesis: it was built in honor of the original Henry Ford and his wife, Clara, and funded by Ford Motor Company and its dealerships. Critics often panned the symphony hall’s acoustics, saying the room could not compare to the old Orchestra Hall on Woodward, out near the Gotham Hotel, in its heyday, although that opinion was not unanimous; some singers (including, later, Martha Reeves of Motown) raved about the Ford’s vibrant sound. But acoustics were not at the top of the agenda for this concert. Being there was.

  The orchestra itself had to make special plans to appear. The musicians, in the midst of an East Coast tour, were flown back that morning from Boston on round-trip tickets that would return them to perform in Worcester the next evening. Their noted resident conductor, the Parisian Paul Paray, had departed the previous night from New York after a concert in Stamford, Connecticut, taking an overnight train to Toledo, where he was met by a driver and chauffeured north to Detroit to set the stage. The “big wheels” of Detroit, as a local society writer called them, appeared at the Ford Auditorium’s semicircular front drive in midnight-black limos and emerged in dark tuxedos and dark business suits. It was a warm night, but that did not curtail the number of women wearing mink stoles over short, bright-colored dresses with matching satin shoes.

  Henry Ford II arrived with his wife, Anne, from their mansion in Grosse Pointe Farms, ten miles east and northeast on Jefferson following the Detroit River and around the curve to the gilded shore of Lake St. Clair. In Detroit’s sociogeographic strata of that era, of rich and richer, nouveau riche and old money, the delineations were clear, the lines seldom crossed: Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham were for company presidents and managers; parts of the other Grosse Pointes were for bankers and doctors and a few mobsters. But Grosse Pointe Farms was for owners. Henry and Anne, the quintessence of the owner class, were destined for separation—he had spiced up his life with a wildcard jet-setting Italian, Maria Cristina Vettore Austin—but divorce was more than a year away, and the Fords could put up appearances in social settings as important as this. Charlotte Ford later called her parents’ relationship “a marriage without laughter. It seems to me in retrospect the last old-fashioned marriage. It was second nature not to ask questions, not to be emotionally involved. If we [the children] were distant from them, they were formal with each other. Each of them had a function, the emotions seemed very limited, it was all very proper.” This sensibility, Charlotte noted, was passed down from the first generation of Fords. She thought of her grandmother Clara as “sort of like the queen of England.” Growing up in the mansion in Grosse Point Farms, she recalled, there were fifteen servants. Dinner was served by butlers in tails. With the Christmas season approaching, there was no expectation that the Fords might trim their own tree; that was done by the Ford Motor Company art department. “If we cried there were always nurses there. . . . I went to boarding school for four years and was miserable. Cried almost every day. No one asked, ‘Are you happy?’ Instead it was, ‘This is what you are going to do.’ It was a very severe home with a lot of rules in that sense.”

  Now, in their final year together, with Ford hosting the automobile society, Henry and Anne were playing their proper roles. Anne was a patron of the arts, a force behind the auditorium and major benefactor of the symphony and other cultural institutions. Earlier that year, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford II—in this case meaning Mrs. Ford, even though he too had a sharp eye for art—had donated a priceless masterwork, Picasso’s Portrait of Manuel Pallares, to the Detroit Institute of Arts.

  The concert began with a bright rendition of the overture from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, which was sufficient for many of the car guys, who jollied downstairs to the social hall at intermission, where champagne was flowing, and never returned to their seats. There were preperformance parties and p
ostperformance parties and more coming the next night and the next: a lavish dinner sponsored by Pontiac at the Detroit Athletic Club on Madison Street (another Albert Kahn building), a dinner-dance in the Statler Hilton ballroom across from Grand Circus Park, cocktails from American Motors in the Sheraton Cadillac ballroom. All for the show before the show.

  Friday noon at Cobo Hall, the Automobile Manufacturers Association held a press luncheon in a ballroom near the seven-acre exposition hall where the show was being staged. The president of the association and main speaker was Ford’s Mr. Ford, known in the trade press by several nicknames: the shorthand HF2, Hank the Deuce, or just the Deuce. He was not always friendly with the press, but he was always good copy. Sometimes he would brush off reporters; at other times he would call them to spill industry beans. He had some traits of his grandfather, especially a killer-cold ability to fire people without compunction, yet there was enough of the irrepressible rogue in him to make him compelling, if never endearing. Hotchkiss and Yale did not stain him with the patina of eastern sophistication. He displayed some of the wit of JFK, his contemporary, but none of the president’s intellectual cool, and in many ways was more like the Texan vice president, LBJ, scheduled to address the auto show in a few days. He sounded just like LBJ once when he disdainfully asked a subordinate, Cal Beauregard, “Are you a sock puller-upper like McNamara?” Robert McNamara had left Ford’s presidency to become Kennedy’s secretary of defense. When Beauregard asked what that meant, Ford replied, “Well, whenever McNamara gets nervous he pulls up his socks.” Not something the Deuce would do. Impeccably dressed yet with a touch of the peasant, with his manicured nails and beer gut and carefree proclivities, his frat-boy party demeanor and head full of secrets, the Deuce was at once the “symbol of the American capitalist,” as noted labor writer William Serrin once described him, and the antithesis of the parade of bland General Motors bosses who came and went during his long reign. Most of all, he knew his trade.