by Unknown
On my second day, I received a promotion. Barbara Gamarekian put me in charge of the press photography file. One of her responsibilities had been to escort the press photographers in and out of the Oval Office during bill signings, and to identify the congressmen and senators and other special guests who attended the events, for captioning when the photos were eventually printed. But she’d fallen behind and badly needed help. “I’m so busy that I haven’t had time to sort out the files and they’re a mess,” she said. “Could you do that?”
I didn’t hesitate to say yes. This, at last, was something I actually knew how to do. I had become a pro at filing and cross-referencing at the Salmagundy. I realize now that Barbara was following the time-honored tradition that governs all summer internships: You smile nicely and dump on the interns all the mind-numbing or labor-intensive tasks you don’t want to do. But I didn’t mind. I loved looking through all the photos and learning the names of the people posing with the President. I was astonished at how much of his daily routine involved photo opportunities.
The casual atmosphere in the press office, where all the men removed their jackets and rolled up their sleeves and everyone called one another by their first names, seemed to exist everywhere in the White House, even at the front gates. When Jill Cowan took me to lunch my first day, the guard marked us out and remembered I preferred to be called Mimi, not Marion, my given name.
There were no cement barricades blocking the various entrances as there are now, and cars drove right past the entrance on Pennsylvania Avenue. The White House and everyone in it back then were just so much more accessible. On that first day, as Jill and I sat at a counter at a nearby coffee shop, picking at our egg-salad sandwiches and talking about everything but politics and government, we could have been tourists ourselves, wandering around the capitol sights, not people who worked a dozen yards outside the Oval Office.
But even though the atmosphere was casual and relaxed, I wasn’t. I was worried about doing a good job and petrified of messing up. At some point during that lunch, I had a minor panic attack, imagining that the news wires were churning out streams of paper that were strewn all over Pierre Salinger’s bathroom floor, and that I was going to be fired. I took a last bite of my sandwich and convinced Jill that we had to hurry back. After all, I wanted to be the kind of worker who gets invited back next year.
That first week was hectic and exhausting in the best possible way. The President was taking a trip to Mexico soon to meet with President Adolfo López Mateos, and everyone in the press office was working on logistics—who would be on the advance team, which press members would go, where they would stay, where to set up a temporary press office, on and on. Reporters were constantly coming in and out, nodding to the new face as they passed by my desk. Jill introduced me to some of them—people such as Merriman Smith from UPI (who would later win a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the President’s assassination) and Hugh Sidey, who covered the White House for Time magazine. They were always in sight, always angling for a newsy tidbit or asking to set up interviews. The office favorite had to be NBC’s Sander Vanocur, who was relentlessly charming and regularly plied the staff with boxes of glazed doughnuts. For a young woman who had been editor of her school paper, these men were heroes.
White House staffers also drifted in and out of the press office. I remember one of them, Wayne Hawks, who arranged transportation for reporters and staff, stopping by my desk after a meeting on the upcoming Mexican trip. He already knew that I came from New Jersey, and he told me he had gone through officer training during World War II at Fort Monmouth near our farm, and we sat and talked about New Jersey for a while. I was startled, some time later, to read about our meeting in the Newark Evening News in a section titled “Washington Footnotes.” My mother clipped the little story and sent it to everyone in the family. “Mimi Beardsley of Sleepy Hollow Road is adding a decorative note to the office of the White House press secretary, Pierre Salinger.…” it said. I can only surmise that Wayne Hawks had planted the story with someone in the press corps as a highly nuanced attempt to sway some future votes in Monmouth County, perhaps in the midterm elections or when the President ran for a second term.
I couldn’t get over the fact that everyone—from the front-gate guards to the travel office people—seemed to know me by name, even though we had never been formally introduced. It was as if I had been awarded membership in an elite club without ever having to go through the initiation process. Even as an intern I was immediately made to feel a part of the team. Looking back on it now, that was the most extraordinary feeling I can recall from those first days: I felt like I belonged.
*In October 1964, when he ran for the Senate in California, Time magazine put him on the cover.
Chapter Four
By my fourth day at the White House, I was feeling considerably more comfortable with my teletype duties. I no longer woke up at night, worrying about failing to respond to a ten-bell incoming message, or walking in to a mess of paper on the bathroom floor. That morning, I was cutting up a sheaf of clips just before lunchtime when my phone rang. I hurried to my desk and picked it up.
“Want to have a swim?” asked a male voice on the other end of the line.
“Who is this?” I asked, though the voice sounded familiar.
“It’s Dave Powers.”
Dave Powers was one of the President’s closest aides. I had met him the day before, when Jill spotted him in the hallway and called him in to introduce me.
Smiling and full of good cheer, Dave welcomed me like a long-lost friend. Like Wayne Hawks from the travel office, he seemed to think it was of enormous geopolitical significance that I came from New Jersey—and made a point of letting me know that he knew all about me. He knew I had two brothers and two sisters, and, ever playful, announced that a paltry passel of five children was insufficient to qualify the Beardsleys as a good Catholic family. (He ignored the fact that we were actually Episcopalian.) An Irish Catholic himself, he admitted to falling short of expectations even more dramatically because he had only three children. Our encounter was little more than run-of-the-mill joshing, but it had all the components that leave an impression—the flattering awareness of me and my family, the self-deprecation about his failure to breed more children, the creation of that inclusive, almost intimate, feeling that he and I had something in common—and make you remember a person’s voice even after one meeting.
Now he was on the telephone, asking me if I wanted to take a midday swim in the White House.
A swim?
I suppose my first thought should have been to question the propriety of this invitation, not to mention how incongruous it was. Dave may have known details about my life, but he didn’t know me. Swimming is something one does with one’s friends and family. People don’t automatically jump into bathing suits with strangers, and certainly not at their brand-new workplace.
I suppose I should have carefully considered all this, but I didn’t. In retrospect, I was thrown off balance. My first response to Dave, which I suppose was my best stab at expressing my confusion, was, “Where do we swim?” I didn’t know the White House had a pool. He assured me it did, a hundred yards or so from the press office.
My second response was more to the point: “I have nothing to wear.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Dave said, adding, “There’ll be a couple of other staffers there. And we have lots of bathing suits. You’ll find one that fits. I’ll swing by the press office in a few minutes and we can walk over.” Then he hung up, as if the matter was settled.
I stared at the handset for a few seconds before I placed it back in its cradle, befuddled by the invitation. Then I looked at Jill’s desk, hoping for guidance. Is this normal? I wanted to ask. Does this happen all the time? But she wasn’t there. I thought about my mom and dad and how I should be keeping a list of all the amazing things I was seeing, so I could tell them later. I thought about how lucky I was to be here. I pictured their astoni
shment when I would call them that evening to describe my White House swim.
I never did make that call.
Within minutes, Dave Powers arrived in the press office to escort me. He greeted me warmly and kept up a cheerful patter as we followed the covered colonnade that bordered the Rose Garden and led to the entrance of the indoor pool. He again mentioned that I wouldn’t be alone. He didn’t seem at all discomfited by the circumstances—a private swim in the middle of the day with a young woman he didn’t know.
Dave’s official title was special assistant to the President; unofficially he was known as the First Friend. His roots with the President went back to the first Kennedy campaign for Congress in 1946, when Powers’s considerable people skills helped the wealthy candidate connect with Boston’s blue-collar voters. He followed Kennedy to Washington, D.C., and never left his side through three terms in the House, one term in the Senate, and now as leader of the free world. Newsweek referred to him, not unadmiringly, as an “irrepressible leprechaun,” and he placed his mischievous charm at the President’s disposal.
No one was more loyal to the President or more in his thrall. When Kennedy and Powers toured the West Wing together for the first time, Powers compared the moment to “being Alice in Wonderland … He looked ten feet tall to me, and he seemed to grow every day.” With the President’s blessing, Powers had carte blanche in the White House; he could go anywhere and say anything. (He was notoriously irreverent. It was Powers who, while walking the shah of Iran into the Oval Office, patted the potentate on the shoulder and said, “I want you to know you’re my kind of shah.”) Above all, Dave Powers’s job was to make the President happy.
As we reached the entrance to the pool, Fiddle and Jill suddenly appeared by my side. They seemed to be veterans of this swimming ritual, which instantly put me at ease. I had not seen Fiddle since she had given me a tour of the White House the year before. I was hoping that she and I would become great friends when I arrived for my internship, but she was four years older—practically a generational divide among college-age girls like us.
I followed the girls into the dressing room, where, as Dave had promised, there were more than a dozen bathing suits hanging on hooks. They were plain one-piece cotton suits of varying sizes, with boxer shorts and gathered fabric at the bustline. I wondered to whom they belonged, or if they were left there as public property to be used whenever someone had the inclination to get some exercise. Fiddle and Jill didn’t waste any time wondering; they just started stripping down and leaping into suits. Their enthusiasm was contagious, so I reached for the first suit at hand. The fit wasn’t as snug as I would have liked, but it wasn’t in danger of falling off when I hit the water, either.
The White House pool, long since covered over to create today’s press office and briefing room, was a perfect oasis, designed to simulate a tropical island.
The walls on three sides of the pool were painted with floor-to-ceiling scenes from St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, with palm trees swaying in the breeze and puffy sailboats moving through turquoise water. The murals had been a gift, orchestrated by Mrs. Kennedy, from the President’s father, Joseph Kennedy.
The fourth wall was mirrored, so the space felt vast, and you were completely enclosed by the faux warmth and sun. As I walked past the mirror toward the edge, I stole a glance at myself in the borrowed suit and felt a wave of relief. I may not have had a lot of curves, but at least I had good posture, and my long legs played up my height and slimness.
Dave Powers joined in as well—sort of. He took off his shoes, rolled up his pant legs, and sat on the edge of the pool, dangling his feet in the water. I boldly dove in, eager to feel the refreshing splash of cool water on my body and to join Fiddle and Jill, who were already floating around, chatting and giggling. But the water wasn’t refreshing at all; it was as warm as a bathtub. Later I learned that the temperature was always set at ninety degrees at the President’s insistence—to soothe his chronic back pain. I remember treading water with Fiddle and Jill, asking them whether the sandwiches and drinks left by the side of the pool were meant for us, when President Kennedy walked in.
He was standing above the three of us in the pool, handsome, tan, in a suit and tie.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked.
Fiddle, ever confident, said, “Our pleasure, Mr. President.” Off he went into the dressing room, only to reemerge minutes later in a pair of dark swimming trunks. He was remarkably fit—flat stomach, toned arms—for a forty-five-year-old man. Fiddle and Jill didn’t seem the least bit surprised to see him, which confirmed to me that this midday swim was a usual event for them and, hence, perhaps not as strange as I had thought.
The President slid into the pool and floated up to me. “It’s Mimi, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Mimi Beardsley.”
“And you’re in the press office this summer, right?”
“Yes, sir, I am,” I replied.
“Is Pierre treating you all right?”
“Yes, Mr. President. He seems very nice.”
“What’s he given you to do?”
I told him about collecting the wire stories and answering the phone and sorting out the press photographs.
“I hope some of that will be interesting,” he said. “You have a good place to stay for the summer?”
“Yes, sir. In Georgetown. My roommate works for the State Department.”
“Well, nice to see you, Mimi,” he said, and he floated away toward Fiddle and Jill.
I spent a few more minutes circling the pool, not knowing exactly what to do, and swam over and chatted for a while with Dave. Then the President climbed out of the water—which Dave took as our signal that the swim was over. I grabbed a quick bite from the food tray, since the pool escapade had become my lunch break, changed out of the wet suit, and returned to my desk.
There, in the tight quarters of the press office—among the closely knit group of women who had been working at the White House since the Administration’s first day—the effect of what I had just done began to dawn on me. Suddenly I felt self-conscious, as if everyone knew where I’d been and was staring at me with stern disapproval. It wasn’t exactly hard to figure out: My hair was wet and smelled of chlorine. It must have been obvious that I had been swimming, but none of my co-workers said a thing. I wasn’t about to bring it up, either.
Who would believe it? And what would they think?
This special access would hardly have endeared me to my office mates. It was the rare employee inside the White House who did not gauge her status by how much contact she had with the President—or even if the President knew her name. Barbara Gamarekian, for example, claimed she had worked on Kennedy’s campaign from the beginning and had been in the White House for a year and a half before the President ever addressed her by name. She admitted as much in her oral history at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library: “I can remember going back to the office and sort of floating on a little pink cloud, saying to everyone: ‘He knows my name! He knows my name!’ ” she’d said. Now, here I was, the summer intern moving to the front of the line, leapfrogging career women who had labored long and hard on the presidential campaign to get a sought-after job at the White House. So I kept my head down and my mouth shut and went about my work as if nothing had happened.
My hair was still damp when my phone rang later that afternoon. It was Dave Powers again, asking if I would like to meet everybody after work at five-thirty for a welcome-to-the-staff get-together. This was impossible to turn down.
“Where do I go?” I asked.
“Upstairs,” he said. “I’ll pick you up.”
I didn’t know what “upstairs” meant, exactly, but I had enough sense not to ask any of the other women in the press office—in case they weren’t included in the invitation. I wanted them to like me, or else I would have to endure a very long summer.
My initial wish was that Dave had given me more notice so I could have wa
shed my hair and put on a nicer dress, but it would have to do. As the workday drew to a close, I kept my eye on the other women in the press office to see if they were going to the ladies’ room to brush their hair or put on lipstick, but they were sticking to their routine; nothing unusual was happening.
When Dave appeared at my desk, I felt intensely self-conscious, convinced that curious glances were being thrown my way by everyone in the office, and perhaps they were.
For the second time in a few hours, I followed him to an unfamiliar part of the White House. Dave was humming quietly to himself as we walked. The White House is not a simple building. It is a warren of offices and odd hallways and large public spaces spread out over four floors and two basements. The West Wing, with the exception of the Oval Office and Cabinet Room, is surprisingly claustrophobic—and represents a small fraction of the White House’s total space. Dave ushered me through the winding corridors past the Cabinet Room, then outdoors under the West Colonnade and past the entrance to the swimming pool, then inside again and down a wide hallway to an elevator.
When the elevator door opened on the second floor it finally dawned on me that I was standing in the family residence. It was a grand, elegant space, an oasis of calm in a very busy building. I wanted to pause for a moment to take it all in, but Dave kept going, leading me to an area known as the West Sitting Hall. It was lined with bookshelves and comfortable couches and chairs in front of an enormous half-moon window opening out on the western sky. There I found Fiddle and Jill in conversation with a man named Kenny O’Donnell, who was the President’s appointments secretary and a Kennedy loyalist on a par with Dave Powers. O’Donnell was the dark, serious foil to Powers’s court jester. The President valued both of them enormously, but for different reasons.
“Have a daiquiri,” Dave said, lifting a frosted pitcher from the coffee table and pouring me a glass. I hesitated. I was not much of a drinker.