by Unknown
That call never happened. It was Helen Ganss, not I, who placed a call to the President to give him some information, and I let out a mock wail in the background because I wasn’t on the trip. That’s what he reacted to, and it was in jest. Why wasn’t I on the trip? he wanted to know. Who had prevented me from going? Helen diplomatically said she didn’t know, which the President accepted at face value. No one got fired—and I didn’t get the day off.
I recount this silly episode because Barbara’s story is now part of the public record and is already finding its way into recent biographies of the President.
But it’s not true. I may have been a naïve and sometimes foolish young woman, but I would never have bothered the President with such a petty personal complaint.
Gamarekian’s bitterness may have been justified. When I returned for my second summer at the White House, the President evidently told Pierre that I should replace Barbara as overseer of the photo sessions in the Oval Office, and Pierre complied. There’s no way that would have pleased her. Access to the Oval Office was the Holy Grail in the West Wing, and “a little girl in the office,” as she described me, had wrested it from her.
In the end, I don’t—I can’t—blame either Chris or Barbara for their severe opinions about me. That first trip to Yosemite—where I spent hours imprisoned in my room, waiting for the President to call for me—taught me that my primary job had changed from being part of Pierre Salinger’s staff to being part of the President’s personal retinue. I wasn’t really helping out with press office duties.
I was there for President Kennedy—and not there for Barbara, Chris, or anyone else.
In early June, just before moving down to Washington for the summer, I went with Tony’s parents to his graduation from Williams. My attendance officially signaled that we were “serious.” Shortly thereafter, Tony went into Army Reserve training at Fort Dix in New Jersey, while I had arranged to room with two close friends from Farmington, Marnie Stuart and Wendy Taylor, in a floor-through apartment on R Street in Georgetown. Marnie had landed a job at the Peace Corps headquarters through a family connection, while I helped Wendy secure a job in the White House gifts department. (I asked the President, who was always keen to help out Farmington girls, for an assist.) Because of my new Oval Office photo duties, I saw the President practically every day he was in the White House that summer. But I didn’t sleep over in the residence anywhere near as often as I had the year before, because Mrs. Kennedy was expecting another child at the end of August, and the President spent much more time with her and the children in Hyannis Port. I also started to branch out a bit socially, and Marnie, Wendy, and I spent a lot of time together. We even went swimming in the White House pool, which is when they met the President. Dave had invited us for a swim, and we were paddling around in borrowed swimsuits when the President arrived in his customary jacket and tie. In short order, he had changed into a bathing suit and was floating alongside Marnie and Wendy, asking about their summer jobs, whether they were enjoying Washington, where they were from, et cetera. I should have warned them that the President was likely to show up, but I wanted to surprise them. The bewilderment and excitement on their faces when he appeared was worth it. But even I was surprised when the President called for a box of animal pelts to be brought down to the pool. He was planning to give Mrs. Kennedy a fur throw for Christmas, he explained, and wanted the opinion of three fellow Farmington girls about which fur was the softest.
One of the few things I didn’t do with Marnie and Wendy that summer—and I regret this terribly—was attend the massive civil rights rally at the Lincoln Memorial, where I would have heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech in person. I had planned to go, and told the President so.
There might be violence, he told me, so I didn’t go.
On Wednesday, August 7, Mrs. Kennedy went into labor on the Cape and gave birth, five and a half weeks prematurely, to a baby boy named Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. The baby had respiratory distress syndrome, not an uncommon occurrence in premature, underweight babies. Though Patrick was tended to by the best doctors, he lived only a day and a half.
I had never seen real grief in my relatively short life until I saw the President when he returned to the White House while Mrs. Kennedy recovered for a few more days in the hospital. He invited me upstairs, and we sat outside on the balcony in the soft summer evening air. There was a stack of condolence letters on the floor next to his chair, and he picked each one up and read it aloud to me. Some were from friends, others from strangers, but they were all heartfelt and deeply moving. Occasionally, tears rolling down his cheeks, he would write something on one of the letters, probably notes for a reply. But mostly he just read them and cried. I did too.
In late August Tony called me from Fort Meade and begged me to come see him because he didn’t have weekend leave and missed me terribly. I explained that I was expected home in New Jersey to celebrate my mother’s birthday, but he was adamant.
The fact that Tony was stationed at Fort Meade in Maryland, only an hour’s drive from Washington, was a result of the one and only time I ever sought a favor for my personal benefit from the President. As Tony neared the end of basic training at Fort Dix, he learned he was being assigned for the next six months to Fort Polk in Louisiana. That meant we would never see each other, so I asked the President to do something about it. We were alone in the Oval Office. I was tearing up as I pleaded my case. By then I knew I was in love with Tony and that I wanted him to be closer to Washington—and me. At first, the President joked about how much pleasure he was taking in removing his competition from the scene. But seeing my tears and distress, he quickly changed course. He said he would talk to his Army military aide, Major General Chester Clifton, and in a few days, Tony was reassigned to Fort Meade in Maryland.
Now Tony was insisting that I come see him that weekend.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
He was so insistent that I became worried. Had he discovered my secret? Had he decided to break up with me? I made some excuse to my mother about working overtime at the White House that weekend and took a bus to Fort Meade. Tony had asked me to bring a picnic lunch, which helped ease my fears about his motivations. As we sat on his scratchy Army surplus blanket in a corner of the parade ground, I spooned out chicken salad and waited to hear what was on his mind.
He got straight to the point.
“I want to marry you,” he said. “Will you marry me?” I wasn’t expecting a marriage proposal, but I needed only a second to process the question. “Yes!” I said. I practically leapt on top of him and kissed him as hard as I could.
There are many reasons people say yes to a marriage proposal. Love ought to be the first reason, and mine was. But so is the need for security and certainty. I had just turned twenty that May and felt, as young people do, that I was dealing with so many unknowns. Where would I be working after the summer? How would this end with the President? Where would I live after Marnie and Wendy went back to college? When would I ever find a “catch” like Tony again?
In marrying Tony, I was opting for security. And perhaps grasping for an escape route from my crazy double life. But I was also doing exactly what girls of my generation and social sphere had been brought up to do: Back then, when you went to boarding schools like Miss Porter’s and colleges like Wheaton, it was inevitable that you’d get invited for weekends at Williams or Brown or Amherst, where you might meet a fine young man who prepped at Brooks or Groton or Andover. The rest was up to you. In marrying Tony I was, in a way, fulfilling my destiny.
That could explain why my parents took the news of my engagement with pleasure rather than shock and why they were not worried for a second that I might be too young for marriage. My mother, after all, had married my father when she was twenty-one. Funny enough, it was my friends Marnie, Wendy, and Kirk who were completely taken aback by the suddenness of my engagement. I could see it on their faces, but they
were far too polite to say anything at the time. Only much later would they share what they were really thinking when I told them: Who is this guy? You’ve only known him eight months! And now you’re getting married?
Tony gave me an extravagant engagement ring created from two oval sapphires that had been his grandfather’s cuff links surrounded by diamonds from his grandfather’s stick pin. The engagement announcement ran in The New York Times on September 8, 1963, and, along with the obligatory information about schools and lineage, made note of my job in the White House press office.
If the President had any misgivings about my engagement, he didn’t let on. He gave me an engagement present—two gold-and-diamond pins shaped like sunbursts. I hid them away, never showing them to Tony or to any of my friends.
Later that fall, however, I took them out to show the President what they looked like against a yellow sleeveless dress I had bought on sale in Georgetown. It was the only time I ever wore them.
The President also gave me a photograph of himself, the iconic color image of him at the helm of his sailboat, Manitou. At the White House, Fiddle had been a wizard at faking his signature on photo requests, but he signed this one himself in my presence.
“To Mimi,” he wrote, “with warmest regards and deep appreciation.” He was smiling when he gave it to me. “Only you and I know what that really means,” he said.
Marnie and Wendy returned to college in September. I stayed on at the R Street apartment for another two months, to finish up my work at the press office and to try and finish up my relationship with the President. What I didn’t realize at the time—and only came to appreciate as I wrote this book—was that I didn’t need to finish up with the President. In his sly and graceful way, he was finishing up with me.
The President asked me to join him on the road two more times that fall. There was a grand tour of midwestern and western states, from Minnesota to Nevada, in late September, and there was a quick trip to New England, where he would be receiving an honorary degree at the University of Maine. On the heels of that second trip, I flew up from Washington on another Air Force support plane to meet him in Boston, where he was headlining a Democratic fund-raiser that Saturday night. I invited Wendy to come up from Wheaton and join me in the President’s suite at the Sheraton Plaza Hotel before his speech.
After a typically full day that also included attending the Harvard-Columbia football game in Cambridge and visiting the grave site of his son at Brookline Cemetery, the President was relaxing on a sofa when I arrived at about six-thirty. He was fully dressed for the black-tie fund-raiser in an elegant tuxedo with pointed lapels. Ted Kennedy, then in his second year as a U.S. senator, was in the room as well, enduring some teasing from the President about his tuxedo’s less-than-au-courant shawl collar.
My most vivid memory from that evening was a moment before Wendy arrived, when the President, once again, tried to show off his power over me in front of other men. I could see that mischievous look come into his eye, the one that appeared when he was about to challenge someone to do something they’d never dream of doing.
I braced myself.
“Mimi, why don’t you take care of my baby brother,” he said to me in front of Teddy. “He could stand a little relaxation.” It was Dave Powers in the White House pool all over again.
This time I felt a flash of anger. And for the first time, I stood up to him. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “Absolutely not, Mr. President.” He immediately dropped the subject.
For years, I have thought about my response as a kind of turning point in my life. I had been struggling, since my engagement, about how to end our affair, and here I was finally asserting myself, finally saying no. It felt good. For much of my life, I thought of this moment as the moment that our relationship truly began to wind down.
In hindsight, though, I’ve come to see that our relationship began winding down long before Boston—and it was President Kennedy who had taken the lead. In forcing myself to catalog the times and dates when we were together, I have come to realize that the President and I had stopped being sexual partners at the end of the summer that year. When I was on the five-day trip out west in September, I didn’t spend the night with him. When I was in Boston in October, I slept in my own bed at the hotel.
It’s easy to see how I could have missed this. For one thing, throughout the summer, I had seen the President practically every day. I took it for granted that I was in his life. It’s a testament to how much more I valued being in his presence—being around him rather than with him— that it had escaped me that he no longer needed me for sex. The President was changing the relationship, and I wasn’t seeing it.
The tragic death of his son in early August and my engagement to Tony three weeks later were crucial signposts. The former must have filled him not only with grief but with an aggrieved sense of responsibility to his wife and family.
Even an irrepressible Don Juan like him might think it unseemly to continue his philandering ways when his family needed him so much. As for my engagement to Tony, it’s conceivable that the President felt bad about continuing to sleep with me now that I was formally attached to another man. Whatever the reason, it’s clear to me that he was obeying some private code that trumped his reckless desire for sex—at least with me.
For the rest of that summer I continued to see the President every day in the Oval Office and float in and out of his private orbit. I continued to swim in the pool with him. There was no change in our personal regard for each other, or in his warmth. But now that I realize that he had been shutting down our sexual relationship, I find it pleasing—and consoling—to see our seamless and unchanged contact as proof that I wasn’t just a plaything to him, that he enjoyed my company, and that if he had lived longer I might have been someone he would want in his life, someone who could work for him after his presidency, someone he would regard in a small but meaningful way as a friend.
Perhaps I’m flattering myself.
The last time I saw President Kennedy was in New York City at the Carlyle hotel.
My wedding was scheduled for early January, and in late October, I moved home to New Jersey to deal with my bridal responsibilities: finalizing guest lists, sending out invitations, assembling my trousseau, registering for gifts, and selecting my bridesmaids’ dresses.
I had been scheduled to take one last trip with the President before my wedding. I vacillated about going, unsure about how I could tell my parents that I had to leave for a few days when I had all this wedding business to attend to.
“Tell them the press office is begging you,” Dave suggested. But I didn’t need to. Dave called a few days later to say the plans had changed. I was no longer on that trip. Instead, Dave asked if I could be in New York on November 15, when the President would be in town to address the AFL-CIO convention at the Americana Hotel. “He is going to be at the Carlyle hotel,” Dave said, “and he really wants to see you.”
I scheduled a few wedding-related errands in the city on that day and went to the Carlyle at about one P.M. The Kennedy family owned a sprawling duplex penthouse on the two top floors of the hotel, one of the city’s grandest. The penthouse was filled with sunlight and had glorious views of Manhattan, which was a nice distraction for me because, once again, I was stuck in a hotel playing the Waiting Game. I was about to leave when he arrived and said he had a wedding present for me. He reached into his pocket and handed me three hundred dollars.
“Go shopping and buy yourself something fantastic,” he said. “Then come back and show me.”
Three hundred dollars was a lot of money back then. I felt vulnerable carrying that much cash as I walked down Madison Avenue and turned east at Sixtieth Street toward Bloomingdale’s. I asked a salesperson to point me toward the most expensive clothes, which turned out to be on the third floor. Although I loved clothes shopping, I had never done it with the equivalent of a blank check. I’d never paid more than fifty dollars for anything in my life, but I
felt obligated to spend every penny of the President’s gift. I finally settled on a light gray wool suit with a black velvet collar, and a pencil skirt that stopped at my knees. It wasn’t a very imaginative purchase, I admit.
The President seemed a bit disappointed when I wore the suit back to the Carlyle to show him. I think he wanted me to buy something more daring, not a tailored wool suit, not something that was the definition of conservative.
He took me in his arms for a long embrace and said, “I wish you were coming with me to Texas.” And then he added, “I’ll call you when I get back.” I was overcome with a sudden sadness. “Remember, Mr. President, I’m getting married,” I said.
“I know that,” he said, and shrugged. “But I’ll call you anyway.” Then I said goodbye, hopped in a cab, and took the train home to New Jersey.
I was hoping that the President was coming around to the fact that our relationship was shifting to new terrain because of my marriage. I’d determined to tell him in Texas that this trip with him would be my last. On the other hand, I was a little disappointed that I’d been dropped from the roster. But I understood why: Mrs. Kennedy had decided to go to Dallas with her husband.
Chapter Eleven
Tony’s twenty-third birthday fell on Wednesday, November 20, so he drove up from Fort Meade in his blue Volkswagen Beetle to meet me at my parents’
house. That night, we celebrated over a birthday cake and spent the next day fine-tuning the Beardsley guest list for the wedding. On Friday, we drove into Manhattan to pick up some dresses. We planned to continue on to his parents’
house in Southport, Connecticut, to spend the night and finalize the Fahnestock invitations.
On our way out of Manhattan, bound for Connecticut, we stopped for gas on York Avenue and Sixty-first Street, just off the entrance to the FDR Drive. When I returned from the ladies’ room, Tony was in the driver’s seat, his head inclined at an odd angle toward the car radio, as if he needed to soak in every word the announcer was saying. He turned to me with a terrible, wide-eyed look I’d never seen before.