“A friend describes the life of the President-elect and his wife as rather like an iceberg,” Knebel wrote, “one part fully exposed to public view and most of it quietly submerged.” He did not reveal that the “friend” was Jackie, or that she had referred to two icebergs in her letter to him, writing, “I would describe Jack as rather like me in that his life is an iceberg. The public life is above the water—& the private life—is submerged.” It was an arresting and disturbing metaphor. There are few things colder and more forbidding than an iceberg, and Knebel had tinkered with her words to make them more compatible with the article’s lighthearted tone. His most telling change was to turn her twin icebergs into a shared one. Two icebergs implied that their submerged lives remained separate and mysterious, even to each other, which was probably what Jackie had meant by her comment “I’d say Jack didn’t want to reveal himself at all.”
She struck others as equally unfathomable. Her secretary Mary Gallagher described Jackie’s life in the White House as “strangely remote,” and claimed she had no really close female friends. Norman Mailer detected “something quite remote in her . . . distant, detached as the psychologists say, moody and abstracted the novelists used to say.” Newsweek described “the subtle smile of a self-restrained pixie,” but the author Marya Mannes had a more perceptive take, calling it “a smile that had nothing public about it, that spoke of things withheld and guarded,” and possessed a quality of “serene removal” found in Greek statuary. Ethel Kennedy thought her brother-in-law would “have a hard time getting to the bottom of that barrel, which is great for Jack, who’s so inquisitive.” When Jackie sat silently during one of the countless Kennedy family celebrations in Hyannis Port, he had said, “A penny for your thoughts,” only to have her reply, “If I told them to you, they wouldn’t be mine, would they, Jack?”
Her intelligence and ambitions lay in the submerged regions of her iceberg. When she graduated from boarding school at eighteen, she wrote in her class yearbook under Ambition in Life, “Not to be a housewife.” The editor of the Washington Star, where she worked in the early fifties, recalled “a bright young woman” who could “see around corners,” and her professor of advanced composition at George Washington University had praised her “brilliant imagination” and ability to “write like a million.” Her greatest literary accomplishment had been beating twelve hundred other applicants to win Vogue’s Prix de Paris in 1951. In her winning essay she speculated on what she would do if she became what she called “a sort of overall art director of the twentieth century.”
Her breathless voice masked an iron will, and a mean streak. She loathed Frank Sinatra, and when he made small talk while escorting her into the Washington armory for the pre-inauguration gala, she elbowed him in the ribs and said with a frozen smile, “Look, Frank. Just smile. That’s all you have to do, okay?” Schlesinger believed that a “tremendous awareness, an all-seeing eye and a ruthless judgment,” lay “underneath a veil of lovely inconsequence.” She sometimes turned this judgment on her husband. When he sent Major General Clifton to her table during a state dinner to request that the marine band play some livelier tunes, she told Clifton, “I chose the music myself. But if he insists, have them play ‘Hail to the Chief’ over and over. That should amuse him.” When Kennedy chided her for not caring what people thought about her, she said, “The trouble with you, Jack, is that you care too much what people think of you.” A reporter overheard her saying, “Where is this great Irish wit you’re supposed to have, this celebrated wit? You don’t show much of it when you’re home.” During the 1956 convention he had asked one of his staff, within her hearing, “Jackie is superb in her personal life, but do you think she’ll ever amount to anything in her political life?” She turned the question on him, asking the staffer, “Jack is superb in his political life, but do you think he’ll ever amount to anything in his personal life?” Yet she still slipped notes to the newsmen preparing to grill him on Face the Nation that said, “Don’t ask Jack mean questions.”
His iceberg was a Greenland-sized mass of secrets and subterfuge that included his frantic philandering, the White House taping system, and his perilous health. His attorney Clark Clifford saw a man who was adept at “never allowing intimacies to go beyond a certain point,” and kept “a very tight rein on his personal emotions.” Jackie had the best grasp of the contours of his iceberg’s submerged terrain. Before their wedding she had asked the wife of a known womanizer how to manage an unfaithful husband, only to be told, “You have to believe that he loves only you. But I didn’t think I was marrying an unfaithful husband going into my marriage.”
“Well, I think I am,” she replied.
Their icebergs also concealed various physical imperfections and vanities. She wore custom-made glasses to accommodate her widely spaced eyes, white gloves to hide her nicotine-stained fingers and huge hands, and extra-wide shoes to accommodate her enormous feet. He wore a back brace, sometimes hobbled around on crutches, used a sun lamp, and disliked carrying cash because he thought that a wallet marred the drape of his suits. He was so sensitive about his “Fitzgerald breasts” that he avoided swimming in public, so concerned with his weight that he traveled with a bathroom scale, and so vain about his thick chestnut hair that he kept a brush in his desk drawer. When he traveled by convertible he waited for an underpass or tunnel before whipping out his comb.
During a campaign trip to Oregon in 1960, Jacques Lowe took a photograph that captured their iceberg-like isolation. It resembled Nighthawks, Edward Hopper’s painting of a man and a woman sitting in a nearly empty urban diner, eyes averted, silent, bored, and alone. In Lowe’s photograph they are sitting side by side in the corner booth of a diner. She is holding a mug of coffee to her mouth and looking down at a magazine. He is resting his elbows on the table, has clasped his hands together in front of his mouth, and is staring across the table at his brother-in-law Stephen Smith, whose back is to the camera. Sunlight streams through some venetian blinds, throwing stripes of sun and shadow across his face. The perfect caption would have been the observation of his friend Chuck Spalding that Jack and Jackie were “the two most isolated, most alone people I ever met.”
Chuck and Betty Spalding were their guests at Brambletyde, their Squaw Island house, the first weekend after Patrick’s death. Both sensed that the loss had drawn them closer. Pointing to Jackie, Jack told Chuck, “See that smile on her face? I put it there.” Jackie told Betty she had been stunned when he wept in her arms. She had never seen anything like it before, and it had left her thinking, “Maybe now I’m getting through to him,” and hoping they might have a different kind of marriage.
There are no photographs of the August 17–18 weekend, but when Jackie returned from Otis on August 14, the White House photographer Cecil Stoughton took some color pictures that are the antithesis of Lowe’s “two icebergs at the diner” shot. Stoughton’s photographs show them sitting in blue lounge chairs on Brambletyde’s flagstone terrace. She is wearing a bright pink shift; he is in a blue polo shirt and long trousers. Everyone in the family except John is barefoot and they are surrounded by their dogs: Charlie the Welsh terrier; Shannon the cocker spaniel; Clipper the German shepherd; an Irish wolfhound named Pushinka, a Russian space dog that had been a gift from Premier Khrushchev; and Pushinka’s two mongrel puppies. Many of the dogs had already been on the Cape, but Kennedy had brought the others up from Washington to distract the family from its grief. In some photographs Caroline rests her head on Charlie, John hugs Shannon, and Jackie holds the puppies in her lap. In others, the president is talking on a white telephone or leaning back and smiling, a proud father admiring his family.
Saturday, August 17, was the kind of pleasant summer day that Kennedy usually liked to spend on the water and at the golf course. Instead, he stayed with his family at Brambletyde until five o’clock, when he played a quick round of golf. Sunday was overcast, and except for attending Mass in Hyannis Port he was at
home until four thirty, when he played more golf before taking Jackie and the children on a cruise. His phone logs show a few telephone calls on Saturday and Sunday; otherwise he devoted the weekend to the Spaldings and his family, and to reading a book that Jackie had given him.
He and Jackie were voracious readers. For her, books had been an escape from her parents’ troubled marriage; for him, an escape during his many illnesses and hospitalizations. His reading had a determined and remorseless quality, and he read at meals, in the bathtub, and even propped a book up on his bureau as he dressed. He had told his friend Larry Newman, “I feel better when there are books around. That’s really where my education comes from.” Exchanging books had become a form of communication for them—a way of expressing feelings they had difficulty voicing. As a homecoming present from Otis, he had given her Letters from Vatican City by Xavier Ryne, the New Yorker correspondent who covered the Vatican, and a biography of Catherine de’ Medici, a flattering reminder of her contribution to “the work” they had to do together. When he returned that weekend, she reciprocated with Jon Manchip White’s Marshal of France: The Life and Times of Maurice de Saxe.* During their 1961 state visit to Paris she had held a long conversation in idiomatic French with President Charles de Gaulle about eighteenth-century French history, making it unlikely that she did not know that in addition to being the foremost military genius of his time, Maurice de Saxe had also been a legendary lover and philanderer.
Kennedy was a fast reader and could have finished the biography that weekend. At the very least he would have read in White’s concise foreword that the count had been “the brilliant adornment of a brilliant age, one of the most renowned and admired men in the Europe of his day,” and “the lover of many celebrated women” who had “won the lifelong friendship of men the stature of Voltaire.” He had also been “among the wittiest and most elegant” military heroes of all time, “a dreamer and an idealist,” and “a deeply interesting person in his own right” who “loved noise, excitement, rewards, women, wine, and glory—especially glory,” and had become a great man “in spite of sickness . . . and the most bitter and ruthless opposition.”
White’s early chapters revealed more similarities. Like Rose Kennedy, who sometimes scooted through her houses in Hyannis Port and Palm Beach with reminder notes pinned to her cardigan and Scotch tape plastered across her forehead to smooth her wrinkles, the count’s mother was “growing increasingly eccentric as the years passed.” His father, Frederick Augustus I, the king of Poland and elector of Saxony, had been a notorious satyr, “an ogre of self-indulgence who regarded the debauching of his brilliant son’s character with positive complacency.” Nevertheless, White wrote, “He was unable wholly to corrupt his son, and many of the princely qualities of Maurice’s nature survive,” including “the energy, magnanimity, and gusto that made him so attractive a person.”
When Jackie lost Arabella, Kennedy had been on a yacht in the Mediterranean; when Maurice de Saxe’s wife had their first child, who would live only a few days, “the father was not at his wife’s side but was rollicking with a sledging party on the frozen Elbe.” Kennedy may have had an affair with Marilyn Monroe; while living in Paris in 1720, Maurice de Saxe “soon became notorious among the ladies of Paris, taking as a lover the glamorous young actress Adrienne Lecouvreur, who discerned in him a real-life hero with the soul of an artist.” Like Jackie, who had taught her husband to care about clothes, food, and furnishings, Lecouvreur found her lover “a promising subject for any woman who had a taste for polishing rough diamonds.” Their romance was troubled, with her complaining, “You were not made to love me in the way that I want to be loved.” After his death, the editor of his memoirs called him a man who “preferred to command love rather than merit it.”
Jack and Jackie had a running argument about whether French or British history was more interesting. Her gift may have been meant as another salvo in that good-natured quarrel, chosen because of his interest in heroism and great men. But because so much of it dwelled on the count’s extraordinary sexual exploits, it would have been difficult for him to ignore that she might have also intended it as a cautionary tale, a warning that this could happen to him: a biography exposing his scandalous philandering.
Monday, August 19–Tuesday, August 20
WASHINGTON
During Kennedy’s weekly Tuesday breakfast with Democratic congressional leaders, Senator Mansfield handed him a three-page memorandum titled “Observations on Viet Nam” that suggested the change in American ambassadors presented him with an opportunity to reexamine “the fundamental premise” behind U.S. involvement in the war: the conviction that its outcome was as important to the United States as it was to the South Vietnamese. If it was, Mansfield wrote, “We are stuck with it and must stay with it whatever it may take in the end in the way of American lives and money and time to hold South Vietnam.” He argued that it was not, although Americans had talked themselves into believing that it was by describing Vietnam as vital to U.S. security and giving it “a highly inflated importance.” The crucial question, he said, was “Have we, as in Laos, first over-extended ourselves in words and in agency programs and then, in search of a rationalization for the erroneous over-extension, moved what may be essentially a peripheral situation to the core of our policy considerations?”
He contended that South Vietnam was peripheral to U.S. interests because it offered no great economic or commercial advantages, and any policy requiring the commitment of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to the Asian mainland, where U.S. naval and air superiority was less effective, was clearly irrational. Given this, he urged Kennedy to consider “the point at which the cost in men and money to the United States of essentially unilateral action to achieve the objective outweighs any possible advantage which it might provide to the security and welfare of this nation,” and to declare that although the United States was concerned with the freedom of Vietnam, “in the absence of responsive indigenous leadership or adequate international cooperation . . . the essential interests of the United States do not compel this nation to become unilaterally engaged in any nation in Southeast Asia.” He also recommended toning down the rhetoric, stressing the relatively limited importance of the area in terms of specific U.S. interests, referring the problem to the United Nations, and considering “withdrawing abruptly and in a matter-of-fact fashion a percentage—say, 10 percent—of the military advisors which we have in Vietnam, as a symbolic gesture.”
Hours after Kennedy read Mansfield’s memorandum, South Vietnamese police and Special Forces units trained by U.S. advisers invaded Buddhist pagodas across South Vietnam. They vandalized shrines, and arrested and beat more than a thousand priests and nuns, killing an unspecified number. Diem declared martial law, imposed a curfew, and cut phone lines to the U.S. embassy. The crackdown violated his promise to Ambassador Nolting not to take any further repressive measures against the Buddhists, and was a calculated insult to the United States, timed to occur between Nolting’s departure and Lodge’s arrival.
At 4:00 p.m., before knowing the full extent of what was happening, Kennedy took the stage at the State Department auditorium for his sixtieth live televised press conference. The conferences played to his strengths. He looked younger in black and white, had a quick wit, a good memory for facts and statistics, and was a superb extemporaneous speaker. Like his debates with Richard Nixon, they were unequal contests in which he came off as more intelligent, charming, confident, better-looking, better-dressed, and more amusing and thoughtful than his opponents—in this instance, the White House press corps. He held one about every sixteen days, calling them when Salinger warned that reporters were getting restless, or when he wanted to pressure Congress into passing a piece of legislation. The main purpose of his August 20 press conference was to scold House members for making draconian cuts to his foreign aid bill. It was a typical Kennedy performance: fluent responses that read as well as they sounded, and an im
pressive marshaling of facts and logic leavened by humor. When asked if he was “seeking a man with a business background or a political background” to serve as his next postmaster general, he drew laughs by replying, “There are other fields that are still to be considered, including even a postal background.” There was more laughter when he answered a question about Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, his probable opponent in 1964, becoming a captive of the radical right by saying, “I don’t know who has captured who.”
Sometimes his cool-cat façade fell away and he turned testy, reflective, or passionate, offering a glimpse of his deeply forested interior. This happened on August 20—after calling his foreign aid bill “essential to the continued strength of the free world,” and insisting that with unemployment at 5.6 percent “the state of the economy is good,” and replying to a question on whether black Americans deserved “special dispensation” for having suffered years of second-class citizenship by saying we should “make sure we are giving everyone a fair chance, but not [through] hard and fast quotas”—when, after delivering these replies in a calm and reasoned manner, he was asked to comment on Dr. Edwin Teller’s testimony on the test ban treaty before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Teller had called the treaty a “tragic mistake” that would weaken American defenses and invite a Soviet attack. When Fulbright reported to Kennedy that Teller had impressed some members of the committee, the president had replied, “There’s no doubt that any man with complete conviction, particularly who’s an expert, is bound to shake anybody who’s got an open mind. That’s the advantage of having a closed mind.”
JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President Page 10