In mid-December 1961, the president and his wife headed off for another whirlwind goodwill tour, this time of Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Colombia. Once again—and very much to Jack’s delight—the first lady was a huge hit, embracing children in orphanages, visiting elderly patients in hospitals, and conversing in fluent Spanish with dignitaries and common folk alike. Crowds chanted “JFK” and “Viva, Miss America!” wherever the couple went.
On December 18 they stopped over in Palm Beach on the way home to see Joe, and for Jackie to start moving things into the house that would serve as their new base during the Christmas holidays. So as not to crowd the rest of the Kennedy family, this time Jack and Jackie rented a luxurious eight-bedroom estate just a mile away from Papa Joe’s La Guerida. The new winter White House, boasting a heated pool and four hundred feet of ocean frontage, belonged to the elder Kennedys’ wealthy friends C. Michael Paul and his wife, Josephine Bay Paul, head of the Wall Street brokerage firm Kidder & Company.
The next day, Grandpa Joe took Caroline to the airport to wave goodbye to Air Force One as her daddy departed for Washington. Once he handed Caroline off to Maud Shaw, Joe headed for the links to play a round with his favorite niece, Ann Gargan. The president’s seventy-three-year-old father was about to tee off on the eighth hole when he suddenly became faint. Gargan took her uncle home, and he went upstairs for a nap. Four hours later, after Gargan checked in on him and discovered he could neither speak nor move, an ambulance was finally summoned.
The seventy-three-year-old family patriarch had suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed on his right side and only able to utter the word “no,” which he did repeatedly. “It was frustrating for him, obviously,” Agent Brown said. “But it was also hard on the President and the First Lady. He always came to his dad for advice, and she just loved him.”
From this point on, the man who put JFK in the White House was confined to a wheelchair, capable of understanding everything being said around him but incapable of communicating his thoughts. Although his face was often contorted and he sometimes drooled, Jackie made sure he was still included in White House functions. She always sat next to him at lunches and dinners, talking to him, helping him with his food, and kidding with him as she had always done.
Jack also was careful to include his father in conversations and deliberations, turning to him for reassurance even when he had no hope of deciphering what Joe was trying to say. Lifting off the Hyannis Port lawn aboard the presidential helicopter, JFK looked down at his father slumped in his wheelchair. “It’s all because of him, everything,” he told Chuck Spalding. “None of this would have happened if it weren’t for him. We owe it all to him.”
After her White House tour television special drew 77 percent of the viewing public in February 1962, Jackie could easily claim to be the most admired woman in America—perhaps the world. During an earlier screening in the White House movie theater, she nursed a glass of Scotch while the president puffed on one of his favorite Upmann Havanas. As the lights went up, CBS producer Perry Wolff recalled, Jack “looked at her with adoration and admiration. There was an emotional connection in that couple, I have no doubt. It was a real look of love.”
No one appreciated that look from her husband—or the change in the public’s perception of her—more than Jackie. “Everyone thought I was a snob,” Jackie later recalled. “Jack never made me feel like a liability to him during the election, but I was. Now everything that I’d always done suddenly became wonderful, and I was so happy for Jack, because even though it was for only three years together in the White House, he could be proud of me then. You know, because it made him happy, it made me so happy.”
Not long after, the first couple threw one of their famous dinner parties for twelve—this time in honor of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. As he got toward the head of the receiving line, Leonard Bernstein was greeted by Stravinsky with a bear hug and kisses on both cheeks. “There was all this Russian kissing and embracing going on,” Bernstein recalled, when from the far corner of the room came a familiar voice. “Hey,” JFK said, “how about me?” Bernstein called the moment “so endearing and so insanely unpresidential, and at the same time never losing dignity.”
Unfortunately, the moments at these White House soirees were not always so dignified. Jackie might have a drink and a glass of wine or champagne, and the president seldom had more than one drink—often a daiquiri, a glass of wine, or a Dubonnet, sometimes a martini or a Scotch—but their overexcited guests frequently got caught up in the moment. That evening, the great Stravinsky got so drunk he had to be literally carried out of the party.
This paled in comparison a raucous dinner for eighty held the previous Veterans Day for Fiat tycoon Gianni Agnelli. At that affair, a well-lubricated Lyndon Johnson crashed to the dance floor while attempting the Twist, and Gore Vidal got into a tiff with Bobby Kennedy after daring to place his hand on Jackie’s shoulder—a quarrel that turned so nasty Jackie banned Vidal from the White House forever.
WITH THE FIRST LADY’S STOCK seemingly at an all-time high, Jack, said Tish Baldrige, “felt it was time for Jackie to take her act back on the road.” In the fall of 1961 JFK had accepted invitations extended by India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and President Muhammad Ayub Khan of Pakistan to visit their countries. While JFK was fond of the Pakistani leader, he could not bear Nehru’s sermonizing. “That sanctimonious fucker,” Jack said. “He’s the worst phony you’ve ever seen.” But the cracks in the relationship between India and the United States were beginning to show, and something had to be done.
Over the next four months, Jackie caused something of a diplomatic kerfuffle by postponing the trip three times; the excuse was always sinus trouble, even though during this same period she taped her TV special, hosted a number of White House parties, rode to the hounds with the Orange County Hunt, and water-skied off the back of the Marlin in Palm Beach.
Jackie was actually screwing up the courage to head out on her own. “Jack is always so proud of me when I do something like this,” she said, “but I can’t stand being out in front.” In March 1962, she set out on her first solo trip abroad—cautiously billed, at the first lady’s request, as a “14-day semiofficial cultural goodwill tour” of the Indian subcontinent. “Solo” was something of a misnomer as well. For company on the road, Jackie had her sister, Lee; her maid, Provi; her favorite Secret Service man, Clint Hill; her hairdresser; sixty-four pieces of luggage—and sixty journalists.
But first, the first lady stopped over in Rome for a private audience with Pope John XXIII. Cassini had created a full-length black dress for the occasion, worn with a lace mantilla borrowed from her sister-in-law Ethel Kennedy. Jackie and the pope chatted in French for more than thirty minutes—the longest private audience with a foreign dignitary John XXIII had ever granted during his papacy. (Jack would never the get the chance to meet the charismatic John XXIII, who died on June 3, 1963.)
In his capacity as U.S. ambassador, noted Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith—at six foot eight inches a towering figure in every sense of the word—greeted Jackie when her plane landed in New Delhi on March 12, 1962. In the coming days, Jackie saw the Taj Mahal by moonlight, fed pandas, jumped horses, took a boat ride down the Ganges, teamed up with her sister to ride a thirty-five-year-old elephant named Bibi, recoiled at the sight of a mongoose fighting a cobra, left a bouquet of white roses at Mahatma Gandhi’s shrine, partied with the Maharaja and Maharani of Jaipur at their famous nine-hundred-room “Pink Palace,” and chatted for hours with India’s first prime minister as they strolled the private gardens of his official residence. Nehru became so enamored of his American guests, in fact, that he asked Jackie and Lee to stay with him.
The Bouvier sisters were not disappointed; over the course of their stay in the prime minister’s residence they were the guest of honor at several elaborate banquets where they were entertained by dancers in brilliantly colored saris twirling to the music of a sitar orchestra. “Nehr
u was a lonesome man,” said Galbraith, “who loved the company of beautiful and intelligent women.”
Just as they had in Europe and South America, thousands of people turned out to cheer the woman whom one overwrought Indian journalist described as the new “Durga, Goddess of Power.” “Jackie Ki Jai! Ameriki Rani!” (“Hail Jackie! Queen of America!) the crowds shouted as she rode in the back of an open car, responding with a gesture of namastes, the palms-together Indian greeting.
The reception in Pakistan was no different: tens of thousands lined the streets to catch of a glimpse of Jackie riding in an open car from Lahore Airport with President Ayub Khan. As a token of his gratitude for the state dinner previously given in his honor at Mount Vernon, Ayub Khan presented Jackie with a spectacular emerald, ruby, and diamond necklace and the gift she would come to regard as the best she had ever been given by a foreign leader: a magnificent ten-year-old Thoroughbred bay gelding named Sardar.
Karachi, Rawalpindi, and the Khyber Pass were all on Jackie’s itinerary in Pakistan, but none matched the beauty and wonder of the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore. “I only wish,” she told her hosts, “my husband could be with me.”
Not surprisingly, by the time she left Pakistan for a three-day stopover in London, Jackie—who was “adamant” about taking a nap every day rather than be “run into the ground”—was nonetheless on the verge of collapse. She seemed none the worse for wear, however, when the Radziwills threw a party for her that included Cassini, British actress Moira Shearer, and legendary photographer and costume designer Cecil Beaton on the guest list. This time Oleg, who at several White House parties had taken it upon himself to demonstrate the Twist to guests more familiar with the foxtrot, taught Jackie an even more au courant dance: the Hully Gully.
On her return to the States, there was the inevitable criticism from Republicans in Congress that military aircraft had been used to transport Sardar to the United States from Pakistan. But not even that could dim what was another diplomatic triumph for America’s thirty-two-year-old first lady. The trip not only smoothed over relations with India, in particular, but on the home front Americans were captivated by photographs of Jackie and Lee riding elephants and camels and touring the grounds of the Taj Mahal.
“The President expected Jackie to seduce Nehru the way she seduced De Gaulle and at the very least charmed Khrushchev,” Galbraith said. “She did not disappoint.” In the end, the ambassador said, Jackie did nothing less than remove all the “bitterness” that had existed between India and the United States. “Jackie had to walk a tightrope, never appearing to take herself too seriously, and at the same time maintaining a certain aura of … majesty is the only word I can think of to describe it.”
In terms of Jackie’s role in enhancing American prestige abroad, journalist Theodore White noted, JFK “knew just how valuable she was.” The political payoff back home was just as significant. “The President used to call me into the Oval Office to look at the headlines and the pictures, grinning from ear to ear and saying ‘That’s our girl!’” Salinger remembered. “Jackie made you proud to be an American, and that feeling translates into votes.”
NONE OF THIS WAS ABOUT to stop Jack from seeing other women while his wife was half a world away. Less than twenty-four hours after Jackie departed for India, Jack headed off to Florida for a few days of “girling” with fellow Lothario George Smathers.
Jackie was under no illusions about what was going on on the home front, although the identities of some of her husband’s lovers would have shocked her had she known. One was a gorgeous, dark-haired multilineal, twenty-seven-year-old mother of two named Helen Husted Chavchavadze. Helen was the ex‑wife of Romanov descendant David Chavchavadze and, incredibly, the first cousin of the man Jackie once intended to marry, John Husted.
Jack began his affair with Helen Chavchavadze when Jackie, then five months pregnant with John, was resting at Hammersmith Farm. To compound the irony, Helen and Jack hit it off at yet another intimate dinner party thrown by Charles and Martha Bartlett, the same couple who played matchmaker to Jack and Jackie. On the way home after dinner, Chavchavadze glanced in her rearview mirror and saw Jack’s white convertible. He followed Helen to her Georgetown house, and they tumbled into bed.
Their affair continued sporadically during the campaign, but after Jack was elected, Helen assumed that JFK would no longer engage in such risky behavior. She was wrong. Days after taking office, Jack and Smathers sauntered into Chavchavadze’s Georgetown house. She felt that by “paying a call” in “broad daylight,” Jack was sending an unmistakable message: “‘I am a free man. The Secret Service are not going to stop me … I will be free to see the women I want to see in the White House.’”
Chavchavadze never knew if Jackie found out about her clandestine affair. If Jackie did, she never let on. Over the next two years, Jackie invited Helen to several parties at the White House. JFK, in turn, invited Helen over when Jackie was out of town. Chavchavadze came to view JFK’s “incorrigible promiscuity” as a “guilt-free compulsion”—behavior he viewed as completely natural and certainly not immoral or “wrong.”
By this time, JFK had already raised the bushy eyebrows of British prime minister Harold Macmillan with offhand comments about his sex drive. “I wonder how it is with you, Harold?” Jack asked when the two leaders conferred in Bermuda. “If I don’t have a woman for three days I get a terrible headache.” (At least Macmillan was spared Jack’s surprisingly candid admission to Smathers that he was “never finished with a girl” until he had “had her three ways.”)
Diana de Vegh was only twenty-two and had just graduated from Radcliffe when JFK found a place for her on the staff of National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. Like most of the other young women Jack surrounded himself with, De Vegh was smart, beautiful, well-bred, spirited—and drawn to power. She was looking, De Vegh later confessed, for a man “who would think I was charming and make me feel safe—like Daddy’s best girl.” Their trysts, which occurred only when the first lady was out of town, took place almost exclusively in the Lincoln Bedroom.
None of the women with whom Jack was involved seemed to be aware of the others. That was certainly true of aspiring painter Mary Pinchot Meyer, an heir to the Pinchot dry goods fortune who had known Jack since his days at Choate. Brought up in Manhattan and on a 3,600 estate in Pennsylvania, Mary was also the sister of Ben Bradlee’s wife, Tony, a former roommate of Pam Turnure, and a distant relative of Diana de Vegh. In fact, in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the rich, blond, Vassar-educated Pinchot sisters had achieved a certain fame as two of Washington’s most intriguing women.
Jack happened to share that view, making frequent passes at Tony even while her husband, his good friend Ben Bradlee, was standing only a few feet away. Tony rebuffed JFK’s advances. Her more adventurous sister did not.
Mary had been married to dashing journalist turned CIA agent Cord Meyer, but they split after the second of their three sons was struck by a car and killed. From that point on, she indulged in several brief affairs, careful to avoid any long-term emotional entanglements.
On January 22, 1962, Meyer began an intimate relationship with JFK—a fact she shared with only person, her friend and confidante Anne Truitt. The affair would last until the end of his presidency.
Like Helen Chavchavadze, Meyer was a frequent dinner guest at the White House. The guest lists for these soirees were prepared by the first lady but run by JFK for his approval (ironically, Jack and Jackie went over the lists with another of his lovers, Pam Turnure). Although Jackie was aware of her husband’s peccadilloes and knew the identities of several of his lovers, she may well have been totally in the dark about Jack’s affair with Mary Meyer.
She was not alone. “Mary was a free spirit—a sensualist and maybe a little wilder than the rest,” Cassini said. “I think she was one of those wealthy young women who were not quite sure of themselves and therefore look for approval in the eyes of powerful men. But she never let on that
she was sleeping with Jack.” NBC anchor Nancy Dickerson was dating Meyer’s ex‑husband, Cord, at the time, “so I was paying attention to those things. I knew Jack was fond of Mary Meyer,” Dickerson said, “but nobody remotely suspected they were having an affair. None of us knew.”
Not Smathers or Spalding or—even more astonishingly—Ben and Tony Bradlee. Much later, in October 1964, Mary was taking her customary walk along the towpath of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal along the Potomac River when someone grabbed her from behind and shot her twice under the cheekbone, execution-style, She was forty-three. A young black man named Raymond Crump Jr. was subsequently arrested, tried, and acquitted of the murder. It was only after Mary’s death that the Bradlees stumbled upon her diary—and a detailed account of her affair with JFK.
“To say we were stunned doesn’t begin to describe our reactions,” Bradlee wrote in his memoirs. “Like everyone else we had heard reports of presidential infidelity, but we were always able to say we knew of no evidence, none.” Given the frequent passes JFK made toward Tony Bradlee—including one party aboard the presidential yacht, Sequoia, when he literally chased her around the cabin—the Bradlees’ sweeping denial about Jack’s womanizing rang hollow. Nevertheless, Mary Meyer was undoubtedly successful at keeping her relationship with the president a secret from even those closest to her.
The Bradlees turned the potentially explosive diary over to the CIA with the understanding that it would be destroyed. When the diary mysteriously reappeared a dozen years later, the original was returned to Tony. She promptly burned it.
These Few Precious Days Page 15