These Few Precious Days

by Christopher Andersen

  The most audacious effort—and the first state dinner ever to be held outside the White House—was for Pakistan’s president Muhammad Ayub Khan. When JFK said he wanted to repay Khan for sending five thousand troops to fight a communist insurgency in Laos, Jackie suggest holding a candlelit dinner on the lawn of Mount Vernon, with its sweeping views of the Potomac.

  “It was a logistical horror show,” recalled Baldrige. Among other things, there was no electricity at Mount Vernon at the time, so giant generators had to be brought in. A tent pavilion had to be set up, as well as a stage for the National Symphony Orchestra. Everything—White House tables, china, silver, glassware—had to be trucked in by the Army, while the Navy was enlisted to transport the 150 guests fifteen miles downriver to George Washington’s stately home by boat. Each of the four vessels had its own trio of musicians, who serenaded guests during the hour-long cruise.

  Although the guest list for the historic dinner was dominated by the names of cabinet members and other high-ranking government officials, there were also contributors to Jackie’s restoration efforts, including the DuPonts, the Mellons, and a little-known diamond merchant named Maurice Tempelsman. Some thirty years later, Tempelsman would become, with the exception of John Jr., the most important man in Jackie’s life—her lover and devoted companion in her final years.

  “I thought she was crazy for even suggesting it,” Baldrige said of the ambitious state dinner on the grounds of Mount Vernon. “But everything went off without a hitch. It was a magical night. Unforgettable.” Baldrige gave full credit to the first lady. “Sometimes I thought they should have made Jackie the head of the joint chiefs. She knew how to marshal forces and make things happen.”

  With the exception of the president and his brother Bobby, who wore black tie, all the men wore white dinner jackets. Jackie wore a sleeveless white organza dress with an emerald green sash and stole designed by Cassini. Everyone watched the Continental Fife and Drum Corps in their eighteenth-century uniforms perform drills and then, at the end of the show, take aim with their muskets and fire blanks directly at the press corps. A cameraman waved a white flag, and Jack wept with laughter.

  THERE WOULD BE OTHER MAGICAL nights that year. In November 1961, the legendary Spanish cellist Pablo Casals performed at a state dinner for Puerto Rico’s governor, Luis Muñoz Marín. It was the first time Casals had been to the White House since 1904, when he performed for Teddy Roosevelt. Among the guests was Teddy’s acid-tongued daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who had been present for Casals’ 1904 White House performance.

  Among the 153 guests that night was Leonard Bernstein. “Fires are roaring in all the fireplaces,” he said. “The food is marvelous, the wines are delicious, people are laughing, laughing out loud, telling stories, jokes, enjoying themselves, glad to be there …” It was, he continued, “like a different world, utterly like a different planet.”

  Although Jack willingly deferred to Jackie on cultural matters (“Pablo Casals? I didn’t know what the hell he played—someone had to tell me”), he always rose to the occasion with toasts, speeches, and banter that sparkled as brightly as Jackie’s haut couture. At the historic April 1962 dinner honoring forty-nine Nobel laureates, Jack lauded the group as “the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

  Jefferson aside, Jackie personally made sure that the guest lists for these affairs sparkled with the most celebrated names in arts and letters. Attending a May 11, 1962, dinner for French minister of culture André Malraux were playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, actress Geraldine Page, director Elia Kazan, choreographer George Balanchine (who coaxed Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev into performing at the White House), Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and artist Andrew Wyeth.

  There was one group that Jackie tried but failed to get barred from all state dinners—the press. “Their notebooks bother me,” she sniffed in a memo to Tish Baldrige. “I think they should be made to wear big badges and be whisked out of there once we all sit down to dinner.”

  The new, gilt-edged atmosphere in Washington was no less apparent to the rest of the world. “They certainly have acquired something we have lost,” British prime minister Harold Macmillan admitted, “a casual sort of grandeur about their evenings, pretty women, music, beautiful clothes, champagne.” Schlesinger went further, gushing that the Kennedys had ushered in a “new Augustan age of poetry and power.”

  To be sure, not all visiting dignitaries were as refined in their tastes as Jackie Kennedy or André Malraux. In anticipation of Indonesian strongman Sukarno’s arrival, Jackie asked the State Department to dig up a copy of a book published about his art collection so she could place it on the coffee table in the West Hall.

  “Mr. President,” she told Sukarno proudly as she reached over to pick up the book, “we have your art collection here.” Then, with Jack sitting on one side of him and Jackie on the other, Sukarno sat on the sofa and began leafing through the glossy, full-color volume. Each painting was of a young woman naked to the waist, with a hibiscus in her hair. “And this is my second wife,” Sukarno said as he leafed through the book. “And this is my …”

  “They were like Vargas girls!” Jackie said, comparing Sukarno’s paintings to the Alberto Vargas nude pinups that appeared in American men’s magazines. “I caught Jack’s eye and I was trying not to laugh …”

  The Kennedys took their show on the road that first spring of 1961, starting with a two-day visit to Canada in May that doubled as a warm-up for a major European tour the following month. That trip would take them to Paris, London, and, most important, a summit meeting with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna.

  “Jack already knew that Jackie would be a huge asset on the trip,” Salinger said, pointing out that in 1960, when French president Charles de Gaulle first met her at the French embassy in Washington, he remarked that “the only thing I want to bring back from America is Mrs. Kennedy.” The feeling was mutual; as a child, Jackie had named her pet poodle “Gaullie” because “he was straight and proud and had a prominent nose.”

  Trouble was, the first lady was suffering from intense migraines and simply didn’t want to go. “Everyone forgets that she wasn’t feeling well that first year,” Baldrige said. Jackie was “making this tremendous effort to restore the White House, and she just didn’t have the energy to do much of anything else.”

  Before the trip, Jack and Jackie spent a restful four days at the palatial Palm Beach estate that belonged to their friends Charles and Jayne Wrightsman. While the president played golf, his first lady slid deeper into depression. “The state visits were daunting for her,” Baldrige said. “She wasn’t trying to be difficult. She was simply tuckered out—and frightened, because at just thirty-one she knew so much was expected of her.”

  Just as Jackie had intervened after his back operations years earlier, Jack took matters into his own hands. He summoned Max Jacobson to Palm Beach, where Secret Service agents picked him up at his hotel and took him to meet “Mr. and Mrs. Dunn”—the aliases chosen for Jack and Jackie.

  Jack didn’t beat around the bush. He told Jacobson that he was worried about his wife—that she had almost died twice after the birth of their son and now suffered periodic bouts of depression and headaches. Would she, JFK wanted to know, be healthy enough to accompany him on his trips to Canada and Europe?

  The only way he could find out was by examining Jackie. Escorted into her room by Provi, Jackie’s maid, Jacobson found the first lady propped up on the bed. “I feel terrible, Dr. Jacobson,” she said, “so tired—and this awful headache …”

  “The least I can do for you,” Jacobson told her in this thick German accent, “is to stop your migraine.” After Dr. Feelgood injected her with his usual potent “cocktail” of speed mixed with vitamins, Jackie pepped up considerably. “Why, Dr. Jacobson, my headache is completely
gone,” she said in amazement. “I feel so much better already.” The First Lady did not bother to ask what was in the syringe Jacobson had just used to inject her. Thrilled at the immediate results, Jack rolled up his sleeves and asked Jacobson to do the same for him.

  In Ottawa, Canada, Jackie, wearing a red wool suite designed by Oleg Cassini to mimic the uniforms of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, wowed the public and parliament leaders alike. For JFK, the trip proved disastrous for reasons that had nothing to do with international diplomacy. At a tree planting ceremony on the grounds of Government House, Jackie turned a few dainty spadefuls of earth while her Dexedrine-fueled husband proved his prowess by plunging his shovel into the ground like a ditch digger. Instantly, he felt a searing pain in his back—a pain that, sadly, wasn’t going to be going away anytime soon.

  Once again, a frustrated and angry Jack was hobbling around the White House on crutches. Jacobson was called back to the White House and, after giving both the president and first lady their shots—a stronger dose than usual in JFK’s case—was informed that he and his black bag would be accompanying them to Europe at the end of May.

  Now both riding high—literally—on Jacobson’s potent amphetamine “treatments,” the Kennedys were greeted by more than a million Parisians who lined the streets screaming “Jacqui! Jacqui!” as their motorcade sped by. The climax of the visit was a glittering state dinner at Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors, where Jackie, wearing a Givenchy gown of white silk embroidered with flowers and four diamond “flame” clips in her hair, continued to charm De Gaulle with her knowledge of French history and culture. When Jackie explained to her host that her grandparents were French, he replied, “So were mine!”

  At one point during the visit, De Gaulle told Jack, “Mrs. Kennedy knows more French history than most French women.” Jack was delighted. “My God,” he told Jackie, “that would be like me sitting next to Madame de Gaulle and her asking me all about Henry Clay!”

  Jack was more than happy not to be the center of attention. “I do not think it entirely inappropriate for me to introduce myself,” he told his hosts. “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”

  Although Jack got an extra boost from Jacobson in Vienna (“The meeting may last for a long time. See to it that my back won’t give me any trouble when I have to get up or move around”), Khrushchev ridiculed Jack’s handling of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and made no attempt to conceal his lack of respect for the inexperienced American president. The summit with the pugnacious Soviet leader was the “worst thing in my life,” Jack privately told journalist James Reston. “He savaged me.” For the first time in his life, British prime minister Macmillan observed, JFK had “met a man wholly impervious to his charm.”

  Jackie, on the other hand, bowled Khrushchev over. At the state banquet held in Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace, Khrushchev insisted on sitting next to the U.S. first lady all evening. Wearing a seductive, skintight pink mermaid dress by Cassini, she tried to impress him with her knowledge of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Pushkin. Instead, he began preaching to her about how many more schoolteachers there were in the Ukraine than there had been under the czar. In response, Jackie proclaimed, “Oh, Mr. Chairman, don’t bore me with statistics.”

  A ballet performance followed dinner at the Schönbrunn, and when the dancers came swooping toward the guests of honor, Jackie again whispered in the Russian leader’s ear. “They’re all paying most attention to you, Mr. Chairman,” she told him. “They’re all throwing their flowers at you.”

  Khrushchev merely laughed. “No, no, it is your husband they are paying attention to,” he said. “You must never let him go on a state visit alone, he is such a wonderful-looking young man.”

  Tish Baldrige, who stood on the sidelines clutching a large black binder bulging with schedules and other tour information, watched with no small degree of awe as Jackie worked her charms on one notoriously prickly head of state after another. “When Jackie could get Khrushchev’s ear, and he would lean close to her,” Tish said, “the President was proud and pleased. After all, he couldn’t get Khrushchev to lean close to him.”

  Soon they were trading lines “like Abbott and Costello,” Jackie later said. At one point she bantered with Khrushchev about the three dogs the Soviets sent into orbit. “I knew all the names of those dogs—Strelka and Belka and Laika. So I said, ‘I see where one of your space dogs just had puppies. Why don’t you send me one?’” Khrushchev merely laughed, but “by God, two months later, two absolutely ashen-faced Russians come staggering into the Oval Room with the ambassador carrying this poor terrified puppy.” Its name, Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin told Jackie, was Pushinka.

  “That trip completely changed the way he saw her,” Baldrige said of the president. “One minute she was a wife complaining about his cigar ashes being ground into the carpet. The next she was charming heads of state and entire nations, arising like the queen of the world.”

  THE KENNEDYS STOPPED OVER IN London on their way home, attending both the christening of Jackie’s niece Anna Christina Radziwill at Westminster Cathedral and a dinner hosted by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace. Immediately after the palace dinner, Jack flew back to Washington without Jackie; the first lady had decided to remain behind and tour Greece with her sister and her husband as a guest of Greek prime minister Konstantinos Karamanlis.

  This jaunt was fine with JFK, with one stipulation: under no circumstances, he warned Clint Hill, should Mrs. Kennedy be allowed to cross paths with Aristotle Onassis. The Greek ship owner, well on his way to becoming one of the world’s richest men, had been arrested by the FBI in 1953 and charged with the illegal operation of U.S. war surplus ships. Onassis posed for a mug shot, was fingerprinted and then thrown into a holding cell with male prostitutes, muggers, and a group of Puerto Rican nationalists who had just been accused of shooting up Congress. He eventually paid a fine (he preferred to call it a “ransom”) for $7 million. The FBI investigation into a broad range of Onassis’s shady business dealings was ongoing, and, simply put, JFK did not want the first lady anywhere near him.

  Not that the president had anything against Greek tycoons in general. Since Prime Minister Karamanlis was far from wealthy, he turned over some of his official hosting duties to yet another Greek shipping magnate, Markos Nomikos. In addition to a lavish villa in the village of Kavouri, Nomikos offered Jackie and her party the use of his 130-foot yacht, the Northwind.

  First port of call: the thyme-scented village of Epidaurus, where Jackie watched a special performance of Sophocles’s Electra in Greece’s perfectly preserved fifth-century B.C. amphitheater. After some expert water-skiing off the back of a small boat, it was on to the island of Delos—reputedly the birthplace of Apollo—before proceeding to the picturesque island of Hydra.

  AT EVERY STOP, CHURCH BELLS rang, boats blew their horns, and locals turned out in force to cheer the American first lady. Rather than depart for Mykonos on schedule, Jackie and the Radziwills popped into a local hangout for a quick drink. When the other patrons began dancing the spirited kalamatianos popularized in the United States by the films Never on Sunday and Zorba the Greek, Jackie leapt up and joined right in.

  Once back in Athens, Jackie, trailed by a pack of tourists and photographers, toured the Acropolis and the Parthenon before having a private luncheon with King Paul and Queen Frederika. As she left, the dashing Crown Prince Constantine, twenty-one-year-old heir to the throne, took her on an impromptu joy ride in his new dark blue Mercedes convertible. Caught by surprise, Clint Hill and the other Secret Service agents gave chase in a follow-up car, careening along the tortuous roads toward the port of Piraeus and on to the villa in Kavouri where she was staying. Jackie was beaming when the Secret Service caught up with her. “She knew she had put us to the test,” Hill wrote in his memoir, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, “and she loved it.”

  In stark contrast to Jackie’s sun-splashed escapade, Jack was having anything but fun.
The trouble began on the flight home from London. Unable to fall asleep aboard Air Force One, he ambled into the main cabin wearing his nightshirt and asked Jacobson if he could do anything to help. Dr. Max dove into his battered black medical bag, filled another syringe—this time with Librium—and administered the shot to the president “to help him sleep. He wanted,” Jacobson said, “to be in his best form for the return to the USA.”

  Once he was back in the Oval Office, however, Jack was coping with more than just affairs of state; he was dealing with ever-more-crippling back pain triggered by the tree planting in Ottawa. Ordered by his physicians to go to Palm Beach to recuperate, Jack brought along Dr. Travell, Chuck Spalding—and two attractive staffers in their twenties known to everyone as “Fiddle” and “Faddle.”

  Priscilla Weir, who acquired the nickname “Fiddle” because as a young child she couldn’t pronounce Priscilla, was yet another Miss Porter’s alumna. Jill Cowan, a member of the wealthy Bloomingdale department story family, inevitably became “Faddle” after the two women shared an apartment in Georgetown. Hired during the 1960 presidential campaign—they thought it would be amusing to introduce themselves as Fiddle and Faddle and wear the same dress—Weir now worked for Evelyn Lincoln, while Cowan clipped wire copy and answered telephones for Pierre Salinger.

  Fiddle and Faddle often swam with the president in the White House pool, and their easygoing, flirtatious manner raised eyebrows. Rumors flew, but Jackie seemed very matter-of-fact about the giggly pair. Once while giving a foreign journalist a White House tour she stuck her head in Salinger’s office and blurted out in French, “And this is one of the young ladies who is supposed to be sleeping with my husband.”

  IRONICALLY, ANOTHER OF HER HUSBAND’S reputed White House lovers—Jackie’s press secretary, Pam Turnure—was on the road with her boss in Greece while JFK “relaxed” in Palm Beach with Fiddle and Faddle. “The only indication I ever had that Jackie knew about all of Jack’s women,” Betty Spalding said, “was when they were in the White House and she asked me if I knew if he was having an affair with Pamela Turnure. I said I didn’t know, but even if I did I wouldn’t tell her.”