Washington postscript: November 19, 1963
AT the conclusion of the December, 1961 Bermuda summit meeting between US President John F. Kennedy and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Governor Major General Sir Julian Gascoigne officiated at a brief Government House ceremony.To commemorate the Bermuda talks Sir Julian presented both leaders with specially commissioned Royal Worcester ware figurines.
The pieces described schools of colourful fish swimming among the coral branches of the island’s reefs and were mounted on Bermuda cedar bases.
Just over two years later, Sir Julian saw the Bermuda memento he presented Kennedy with again.
On November 19, 1963 Bermuda’s Governor had a meeting in the Oval Office with President Kennedy — just three days before misfit Lee Harvey Oswald murdered JFK on the streets of Dallas, Texas with a mail order rifle.
Sir Julian and Lady Gascoigne were visiting Washington that fateful week, lunching with Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Sen. J.W. Fulbright on Monday, November 18 to discuss arrangements for a pending US/UK legislators’ conference to be held in Bermuda the following February.
“Senator Fulbright said the President did not seem to be worried about the opposition he was facing in Congress (from Republicans and Southern Democrats opposed to his Civil Rights legislative programme) but that the Democratic leaders were,” recalled Sir Julian.
In fact Kennedy’s two-day swing through Texas - beginning on November 21 - was intended, in part, to boost his waning popularity in the South and revitalise the White House’s stalled Civil Rights initiative.
The next day, Tuesday, November 19, the Gascoignes took a private tour of the White House and were being shown around the Executive Mansion when they saw Pierre Salinger, the President’s Press Secretary who they first met in Bermuda when he arrived in advance of Kennedy to help make arrangements for media coverage of the summit.
“Mr. Salinger said: ‘The President would very much like to see you’,” Lady Gascgoine later said. “When he heard you were coming to visit the White House he said he particularly wanted to see you because he had such a wonderful time in Bermuda.”
Salinger escorted the Governor and his wife directly to the Oval Office.
“He was on top of the world,” said Lady Gascoigne of the President, who greeted his Bermuda visitors effusively. “He looked very well and he was not at all stiff.”
Sir Julian asked the President about his back — his chronic back problems, aggravated by an injury at a 1961 Ottawa tree-planting ceremony, had been very much in evidence at the Bermuda conference (“In health, I thought the President not in good shape. His back is hurting. He cannot sit long without pain,” noted Macmillan of Kennedy’s physical condition in Bermuda. “He is very restless owing to his back ... He finds it difficult to sit in the same position for any length of time.”)
The President told the Gascoignes he was in good health and had almost fully recuperated from his back trouble.
Then the President took the Gascoignes into an anteroom off the Oval Office — and showed them the Bermuda figurine which was displayed on a mantelpiece.
He also apologised for wife Jacqueline’s absence, explaining she was horseback riding in Virginia and said given her interest in history and art she would have made a far better guide to the White House than he would.
The President then escorted the Gascoignes back to the Oval Office and showed them his desk, made from an American-built arctic exploration vessel presented to Queen Victoria by the Amrerican people in the 1850s.
When the time came for HMS Resolute <$>to be broken up in 1879, said Kennedy, Queen Victoria asked for a desk to be made from its timbers which she presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes as a memorial to the American goodwill that had resulted in the gift of the ship.
Although used in the White House for many years — President Roosevelt had claimed it as his own as recently as the 1930s — Mrs. Kennedy discovered it tucked away in a White House basement. She had it restored, said the President, and then returned to the Oval Office.
In the White House Flower Garden, officers of the National Education Association were scheduled to meet the President so the Gascoignes said their farewells.
When they heard the news of the assassination on November 22 while staying in Long Island, New York prior to their return to Bermuda, the Gascoignes were aghast.
“We felt the civilised world had been put back,” said Lady Gascoigne.
“We felt there had been a great cleavage between the time before it happened and the time afterwards. Americans were stunned with horror.”
