by Ted Sorensen
When his back permitted, he played golf, often immediately upon arrival at whichever weekend home was near a course. Although neither his back nor his duties permitted much practice, he was a natural golfer and a good one, shooting in the low 80’s. Red Fay told of the game in May of 1960 at Cypress Point, California, when the candidate pleaded with a drive headed straight for the hole not to drop in. The publicity from a hole-in-one, he said, would not help a Democratic candidate at a time when Presidential golfing was a subject of not always friendly comment. He never used the putting green Eisenhower installed behind the White House, and was amused by the children’s forts dug in the sand trap and the toys planted near the cup. At least once, however, he was out in the back driving golf balls toward the Washington Monument.
His friends have related how he fancied himself to be Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer or some other professional champion whenever he swung a golf club (or Y. A. Tittle, the famed New York Giants quarterback, whenever he picked up a football). “He never started a game [of golf],” said British Ambassador David Ormsby-Gore, a frequent partner, “without working out a very complicated system of bets” in a discussion that usually lasted through the first three holes, with all bets doubling on the ninth.
The Ormsby-Gores (later Lord and Lady Harlech) were often guests of the Kennedys at Cape Cod, Camp David and Palm Beach, but their discussions rarely centered on British-U.S. affairs. They had been personal friends for many years, and the President felt no obligation either to transform all his personal relationships to an official level or to transfer all his professional relationships to the social level. I saw them socially on comparatively rare occasions, without the slightest embarrassment about this on either side.
When he was not working, he and Jacqueline liked having people around who were cheerful, amusing, energetic, informed and informal. While the friends mentioned in Chapter I also served as sources and sounding boards for independent ideas and information, they sought, with rare exception, no influence or favors, and they were all as candid and casual with the Commander in Chief as they had been when he was a Congressman. He found, after the first few weeks, that it was difficult for him as President to take walks with an old friend around the Washington Monument or to drop in on one as casually as he had dropped in at Joe Alsop’s his first night as President (where he hungrily devoured terrapin soup, the only food that could be located, while discussing the experiences of Inaugural Day). But he did continue his practice of calling his old friends by telephone at all hours of the day and night.
HIS FAMILY
No friend ever drew as close to John Kennedy, or contributed so much to his spirit and strength, as his wife, his daughter and his son. He would rather eat fettucine with them in the family dining room than preside over the most important formal banquet in the State Dining Room. Whatever cares or crises pressed upon him, he kept time free for his family and kept his family life free from the strains of office. He deeply loved his wife and children; he was deeply proud of them; and their love and pride in turn provided him with both essential relief from his burdens and additional reason to bear them.
His children often played on the equipment newly set up on the lawn behind the Mansion, and that was also the play area for a small White House school which the First Lady organized to make life more normal for Caroline and John. Whenever he saw either of them playing out on the lawn or walking with one of their several dogs, the President would interrupt all but the most formal conversations in his office, stand in the outside door and clap his hands until both children and dogs came rushing over. Awkwardly stooping down, he ignored pain and passers-by to pick them up, his face more relaxed in those moments than I had ever seen it with any adult.
Back in the days when he was traveling the long, hard road that had led him to the White House, John Kennedy had had too little time to spend with Caroline (whose first word was “plane”); and John, Jr. was not born until his father was President-elect. Consequently it was in the White House, and on their holidays together, that the President truly discovered his children. How best to rear children, a subject of no interest to him in earlier days when his friends and siblings raised it about their offspring, suddenly became one of his favorite topics of discussion.
Like their parents, both Caroline and John, Jr. were unusually bright, alert and constantly inquisitive, bursting with restless energy, reserved with newcomers but always friendly. While legend has already made them sound more like angels than normal children, they were as capable of mischief and misbehavior in the White House as any other children in any other house; and their mother, referring during the campaign to the books of Kennedy supporter Dr. Benjamin Spock, said she found it “a relief to know that other people’s children are as bad…at the same age.”
President Kennedy, that intellectual, sophisticated man, considered cold by his critics and complicated by his admirers, possessed a gift for communicating with children—with his children, with my children, with all children. He never talked down to them, and they always understood him. “He talked to me,” confided one aide’s thirteen-year-old son to his diary, “with an air of business-like equality.” At the same time he was realistically aware of how limited an adult’s influence is in the small child’s world. Secretary McNamara liked to tell of the time he saw the President accost Caroline in the midst of the Cuban crisis just before her supper hour. “Caroline,” he said, “have you been eating candy?” She ignored him. The question was repeated and it was again ignored. Finally, summoning up his full dignity as Commander in Chief, he asked his daughter, “Caroline, answer me. Have you been eating candy—yes, no or maybe?”
Similarly, when he was accompanied by John, Jr. one morning to our pre-press conference breakfast, he found his son’s continued presence unbusinesslike but not easily ended. After shaking hands and bowing all around with a gusto worthy of Honey Fitz himself, John took over a proffered chair and very nearly took over the meeting. His father’s suggestions to leave, accompanied by bribes to take him to the office later, were loudly resisted. Deciding to ignore him, the President opened his request for questions with the usual “What have we got today?” The first answer was John’s: “I’ve got a glass of water.” Accepting defeat, the President sent for the children’s long-time nurse, an unflappable English “nanny” who soon persuaded John that he should join his sister. “Marvelous,” said the President, “there would have been a storm of tears if I had tried that.”
Caroline Kennedy quickly became a national figure—tottering somewhat unsteadily into her father’s Palm Beach press briefing in her mother’s shoes, offering a rose to India’s Nehru, wandering into the press lobby to report that her father was “sitting upstairs with his shoes and socks off not doing anything,” emerging from church with her large rag doll in her father’s custody, wading into a friend’s swimming pool over her head, and asking Speaker Rayburn why he didn’t have any hair. She took to horses like her mother, to the sea like her father and to books like both. Together with John, Jr., she met more heads of state than most Cabinet members, often watched ceremonies on the White House lawn from upstairs (once with cries of “bang” to echo each volley in a twenty-one-gun salute) and one hot day took a dip in the South Lawn fountain.
Her father, who gave up calling her “Buttons” when she acted so grown-up at age four, was fascinated by her retentive memory, a trait both he and his wife had long possessed, and as she grew older, the bedtime stories at which he excelled were supplemented by the poetry which he delighted in hearing her repeat. Addressing on the South Lawn a group dedicated to preserving the White House and other historical buildings, he had occasion to quote spontaneously one of the couplets he had taught his daughter and which he had long promised her he would use in a speech:
Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Came and see my shining palace built upon the sand!
He correctly attributed these lines to Edna St. Vincent Millay. But later he told me w
ith some embarrassment that he had almost said Emily Dickinson and that Caroline’s memory was better than his.
Both parents, the wife more than the husband, worried about the effects of too much publicity on both children, the daughter more than the son. In the hectic preinaugural days, watching over his daughter between appointments and task forces while Jacqueline was in the hospital with infant John, the President-elect suggested to the reporters and photographers who followed Caroline’s every move that it was “time we retired her.” But this was not easily done in the White House, with the press and public wanting more and more pictures and feature items. Jacqueline came to the conclusion that neither her husband nor his Press Secretary was as concerned as she that publicity would alter the children’s attitudes. When I remarked that one authorized article on Caroline of which she was complaining had been regarded as excellent by the President and Salinger, she replied a bit tartly, “Well, they are not very good judges, if you ask me.”
Providing a normal life for her children and a peaceful home for her husband was only one of Jacqueline Kennedy’s contributions to the Kennedy era, but she regarded it as her most important. “It doesn’t matter what else you do,” she said, “if you don’t do that part well, you fail your husband and your children. That really is the role which means the most to me, the one that comes first.” No one should have been surprised by her refusal to give more speeches, press interviews and women’s receptions. In the campaign candidate Kennedy had avoided mawkish references to his wife, made no pretense of involving her in political and policy decisions, and, even had she not been expecting their son, would not have urged upon her a large campaign role apart from his own. And Jacqueline, when asked about her role in the White House, had replied:
I’ll always do anything my husband asks me to do…. [But] I think the major role of the First Lady is to take care of the President…[and] if you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.
In the White House husband and wife were very close. His election, to her surprise, strengthened instead of strained their marriage. Those were their happiest years. Jacqueline and the children, contrary to her fears during the campaign, saw more of her husband than ever before, and he found with her a happiness and love he had never known before. He became more relaxed, less demanding and very proud of his wife. Often, as I boarded a helicopter on the White House lawn to begin some Presidential journey, I would see Jacqueline walking with her husband to his plane, hand in hand, without regard to the police or politicians all about them.
She never interfered with his work or volunteered advice on his decisions, wisely content to let him be concerned with the country’s life while she concerned herself with their family life. She provided not only a welcome change from his political and official chores but a fresh perspective on the world as well. Equipped with a gentle satirical wit of her own, she could deflate any pompous Presidential posture he did not immediately deflate himself. Refusing to let either her tastes or time be swept away by a sea of strong-minded Kennedys, she gave her husband new interests and tastes to round out the old, even as she studied history and golf to keep up with him. They learned from each other.
Like her husband, Jacqueline remained essentially unchanged by either adulation or adversity. She was herself at all times, even when not everyone wanted her to be herself. During the campaign we had received constant advice on how Jacqueline Kennedy should be more of a politician like Eleanor Roosevelt or more homespun like Bess Truman. Her clothes, it was said, were too expensive, her hair-do too fancy, her interests too rarefied. Even in her first months in the White House she was criticized for not addressing countless women’s groups, for not equaling Mrs. Khrushchev’s response to a women’s peace petition, and for not devoting more time to a hundred worthy causes and crusades.
But Jacqueline Kennedy, sensitive but strong-willed, so long as her husband would not be harmed by her decision, had no desire to be anyone else. By maintaining her own unique identity and provocative personality, she never bored or wearied the President, and had full time for him and her children. As the Attorney General once commented, “Jack knows she’ll never greet him with ‘What’s new in Laos?’” In addition, by continuing with her “fancy ways” and fox hunting, her water skiing and antique hunting, by refusing to appear more folksy at political rallies or less glamorous in poorer nations, by carrying her pursuit of quality and beauty into White House decorations and dinners, she brought great pleasure to millions in every land, rich and poor alike. She became a world-wide symbol of American culture and good taste, and offered proof in the modern age that the female sex can succeed by merely remaining feminine.
Her televised tour of the White House was a memorable gift to the American people. No longer bothered by crowds, she became John Kennedy’s proudest asset when accompanying him on state visits abroad and on political trips in this country. She also won countless friends for her husband and country on an official trip of her own to India and Pakistan (where she had, as the President told an audience that week, “her first—and last—ride on an elephant”) and on quieter vacation visits to the Mediterranean. On the night of November 21, 1963, she told her husband how happily she looked forward to being able to campaign with him in 1964. Earlier that evening, says Dave Powers, the President had asked him for a comparison of crowds between that visit to Houston and the President’s previous trip there in 1962. “Just about as many came out to see you as they did on our last visit, Mr. President,” replied Dave, “but there were about a hundred thousand more for Jackie.” And the President, beaming at his wife, said, “You see, you do help.”
The vicious rumors about the President and his wife which had circulated in the campaign recurred from time to time. None angered him more than the report that, as a young man, he had been previously married. “I wouldn’t be the last to know that!” he said bitterly.
The fact is that Kennedy’s own candor and humor, his refusal to take himself too seriously, his constant stimulation of excitement and controversy, his recognition of intellect and art, his assault on myths and complacency, and perhaps even his genuine attachment to his family in an age when some thought that “unsophisticated”—all made possible an unprecedented atmosphere in which the President of the United States and his family could be mimicked, mocked, criticized, insulted and made the subject of countless stories, songs and skits. It was a lively, new and healthy atmosphere, and President Kennedy was willing to take its bad points along with its good.
He was amused, and amusing, about success symbols of this new atmosphere. Asked at a news conference whether he was annoyed by a sometimes funny recording of skits about “The First Family” by a very skillful Kennedy impersonator named Vaughn Meader, the President said, “I listened to Mr. Meader’s record, but I thought it sounded more like Teddy than it did me—so he’s annoyed.”
INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL REVIVAL
This atmosphere of gaiety and verve was by no means limited to critics and mimics. A wave of intellectual interest and excitement rippled out from the White House. Learning and culture were in style. “The quality of American life,” said the President, “must keep pace with the quantity of American goods. This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.”
He cared deeply and personally about education, human rights, better health, cleaner cities and greater dignity for the aged. Believing that “A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors,” he initiated the new Medal of Freedom Awards as an annual civilian honors list for those who have enriched our society, personally worked on the medal’s design, and insisted that awards go to several controversial figures, including some critical of his administration. He kept in touch with Robert Frost, whose poetry had graced his inauguration, visited with him at the White House, corresponded with him through the years and paid a posthumous tribute to him at Amherst. He gave as much attention to French Cul
tural Affairs Minister André Malraux as he gave to the foreign affairs ministers of many other nations.
The White House became both a showplace and a dwelling place for the distinctive, the creative and the cultivated. It was also, cracked the President to one gathering of intellectuals, “becoming a sort of eating place for artists. But they never ask us out.” At a dinner honoring American Nobel Prize winners, their first official recognition by our government, he announced: “This is the most extraordinary collection of talent… that has ever been gathered together at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” One of the Nobel scientists honored, pacifist Linus Pauling, sought to attract attention to his cause by picketing the White House that day. But the President merely congratulated him on expressing his opinions so strongly, and the First Lady chided him that Caroline had asked, “What has Daddy done now?”
State dinners at the White House, I can testify from my few firsthand experiences, had an atmosphere of warmth as well as elegance. Formal protocol was held to a minimum. Changing clothes in my office and walking over, I was given my seat assignment and introduced to my dinner partner by one of the military or social aides. As the guests talked in the East Room, martial music announced the arrival on the staircase of the President and Mrs. Kennedy and the guests of honor. A receiving line formed, the President usually laughing at being formally introduced to me by a military aide and adding some humorous twist to my job description as he introduced me to the visiting chief of state.
From my seat well below the salt at dinner, I could observe the President amusing the ladies on either side of him, then knitting his brow as he asked a guest a more serious question, then laughing once again at some bantering exchange. The guests on either side of me were among those personally selected by the President, who used dinner invitations as a means of honoring, influencing, thanking or meeting all kinds of people. Occasionally, the long horseshoe-shaped banquet table was replaced by a cluster of little tables. The food, the wine and the background music were delightful, the toasts short and frequently funny.