Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  Maxims of Political Survival and Skulduggery

  Once Jackie went to Viking and then to Doubleday, her efforts to be sure the Kennedy era was remembered shifted from bricks to books. One of her first books at Viking was a biography of Chicago’s Mayor Daley that vindicated Jack Kennedy’s election as president in 1960. She approached Eugene Kennedy with the idea of doing a Daley biography soon after joining Viking in 1975. Jimmy Breslin, a journalist in New York, whom she may well have known via his fellow journalist Pete Hamill, brought Kennedy’s work to her attention. She didn’t tell Kennedy that she wanted him to investigate the story that Daley’s corrupt manipulation of Chicago’s ballot boxes had delivered JFK’s razor-thin margin of victory over Richard Nixon. She didn’t have to.

  After Kennedy agreed to write the biography, they decided it might be a good idea if Jackie flew out to Chicago to help him gain Daley’s cooperation. He proposed that they meet somewhere nice, quiet, French. “No,” she replied, “someplace low-down and dirty”; an ordinary hamburger joint would be fine. Did she need special arrangements to protect her from being accosted? “Oh, no—I never want anything like that! The best thing we can do is just walk fast.” Daley defeated them both. He did not turn up, pleading urgent city business at the last minute.

  The 1976 Democratic convention was coming up that summer in New York. Kennedy and Jackie figured that they might corner the mayor there. Daley was certain to attend, and he could not turn down a meeting with her if she found him in such a public place. When they finally found Mayor Daley and told him that they wanted to write and publish his biography, with his cooperation, he was not pleased. Eugene Kennedy remembered, “He loved Jackie, but the slight quiver in his jowls meant that he wanted no part of it.” Although he was for a moment disconcerted, the wily old politician said, “I’ll look into it.” He offered no further cooperation, and Kennedy was forced to go ahead and do his research without the mayor’s help.

  Daley died later that year, while in his twenty-first year as mayor and reigning boss of one of America’s oldest political machines. This increased the pressure for Kennedy to finish his work and get his book out as quickly as possible. Jackie helped him. In those early days she was not a line editor. She worked with other editors, such as Viking’s Cork Smith, who knew the business better than she did and handled details, but Jackie was a kind of Guenevere who had connections to help authors that other editors didn’t have. She helped Kennedy get interviews with former members of JFK’s staff, such as Larry O’Brien, and she shared her personal recollections of Daley. She told Kennedy that Daley could have asked for anything in the way of political patronage after the 1960 election, but all he wanted was to spend one night in the White House with Mrs. Daley.

  Kennedy and Jackie also discussed the Irish Catholic immigrant background that Mayor Daley shared with JFK’s family. She was clear-eyed about the way in which nineteenth-century urban corruption had lasted well into the twentieth century. Kennedy said, “She understood all that. She used to talk about Boss Plunkitt and his maxims of political survival and political skulduggery,” referring to a book one of New York’s Tammany Hall machine politicians had written. Kennedy’s biography of Daley devotes considerable space to showing the legitimacy of Daley’s election-night machinations on JFK’s behalf. Jackie, however, had no illusions about the sort of foul play that went on in Democratic political machines. Kennedy’s book set out in detail how the Cook County vote for Kennedy was legal, but his conversations with Jackie indicated her acknowledgment that skulduggery may also have been in play.

  A similar kind of contradiction in her defense of JFK’s legacy is evident in subsequent books she commissioned from Eugene Kennedy. JFK had to overcome negative religious stereotypes in order to be elected the first Roman Catholic president, but two of the other books she and Kennedy did together contributed to some of the worst stereotypes possible about Roman Catholic politics. Eugene Kennedy wrote several novels for Jackie after she moved to Doubleday. One of them, Father’s Day (1981), centers on underhanded political maneuvering in the running of Notre Dame, America’s premier Roman Catholic university. The other, Fixes (1989), is about dirty politics at work in the Vatican, where angling cardinals, a saint, and the CIA are all involved in getting a new pope elected after the old one dies. In publishing Eugene Kennedy’s fiction, Jackie was underscoring negative images still associated with the Roman Catholic Church in the minds of many Americans of other faiths.

  Nor was Jackie entirely consistent in her attitude toward biographers. Her editorial colleague Lisa Drew remembered how much she hated to see anything written about her. When John Kenneth Galbraith sent her a copy of his letter refusing to speak to one biographer who wanted to write about her, she thanked him, adding that now she knew “chivalry is not dead.” She hoped to control her biography even beyond the grave, and she included in her will a line instructing her children to resist the publication of her letters. Yet she had been willing to try to maneuver Mayor Daley into agreeing to a biography by cornering him at the convention and using her fame to compel him to cooperate. Judith Martin at the Washington Post, better known as Miss Manners, pressed Jackie on the question of how she could be the editor of several biographies, some of which were unauthorized by their subjects, when she was legendarily so resistant to having her own biography written. Jackie replied, “When it’s past, it becomes history.” Martin asked whether she would mind if a historian were someday to publish her unpublished letters. Jackie said disingenuously, “I won’t be here to mind.” She later made sure that the lawyers writing her will knew that she minded very much.

  Jackie also suggested in a casual conversation with her Doubleday colleague Tom Cahill, the religion editor, that he should commission a biography of Cardinal Cushing, a priest whom she knew well and admired. Cushing had officiated at her marriage to JFK, at the inauguration, and at JFK’s funeral mass. When Cahill pursued her idea and signed up a biographer to write about Cushing, Jackie had Nancy Tuckerman write a formal letter to Cahill, whose office was adjacent to hers, saying that under no circumstances could this biographer quote from her correspondence with Cushing. It had been Jackie’s idea to do the biography of a man whose fame in part rested on his association with her. When Cahill pressed her on this, she told him he wouldn’t understand, but as a woman who was under the thumb first of her father, then of her two husbands, she had gotten used to obeying; now that she was free, she was going to do whatever she could to control her words. The tenor of this defense, and her belief in the power of words, sounds very much like Jackie. It’s hard to blame the woman for wanting a private life, but because she delighted as a reader in knowing the private lives of the men and women whose biographies she commissioned, it is worth questioning whether she didn’t sometimes rather abuse the power she had acquired as Guenevere. Compromising other people’s privacy in order to achieve a good biography was one of her editorial priorities. Protecting her privacy and stopping biographies from being written about her own life was among her foremost personal priorities.

  In Which Jackie Goes Hiking

  Before Stewart Udall died in March 2010, at the age of ninety, he was the last living member of the Kennedy cabinet. He had had a distinguished career, serving as a congressman from Arizona, before joining the administration as interior secretary and adding large acreage to the national parks under both President Kennedy and President Johnson. He also presided over the establishment of the first federally protected national seashores. He was an early voice speaking in favor of the protection of the environment, publicizing the work of Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring alerted readers to the hazards of pesticides, and writing his own Quiet Crisis (1963), for which JFK wrote the introduction.

  Udall and his wife, Lee, retired from Washington in the 1980s and moved back to Arizona. In his native part of the country and newly aware of the presence of Spanish-speakers in that part of the world, he wondered why Americans paid so little attention to the Spanish dim
ension of their history. Udall also remembered with shame the social division between whites and Latinos in St. Johns, Arizona, where he had grown up. He wrote a magazine article for Arizona Highways in which he and a photographer, Jerry Jacka, traced the trail of the Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, who had traveled up from Mexico through Arizona, New Mexico, and other parts of what is now the American Southwest in the 1540s. Purely “on impulse,” and after a long lapse in their friendship, Udall sent a copy of his magazine article to Jackie in New York and suggested that together they should make a book out of it. Jackie telephoned Udall in Arizona and said, “Let’s do it.”

  Before the contract could be signed or prepared, Udall and his wife invited Jackie and Maurice Tempelsman to visit in Arizona so they could see for themselves a little of the geography Coronado had explored. In June 1984 the four joined photographer Jerry Jacka and his wife to hike part of the trail that Udall had earlier hiked with Jacka. There had been some trepidation about the visitors from New York. Udall characterized himself and his wife as “small-town Mormon kids who grew up on the Colorado plateau.” Although the Udalls knew Jackie from the White House years, she had been busy raising small children then. Speaking in a gravelly voice, Udall recollected, “She stood up magnificently in the period after the president’s death.” He paused, as if to reflect. “Then she married Onassis.” Another pregnant silence. “I believe some money was involved.” Although he had known her personally in the 1960s, the woman arriving on the plane in the 1980s was almost as much of a stranger to him as she was to millions of other Americans.

  Jerry Jacka remembered that Udall had planned “a rather rigorous journey” for the hiking trip. “I had a new 1984 Chevrolet Suburban and we literally broke it in on that trip. We were all in this Suburban, bouncing along, when Lee Udall and Jackie began to share stories from the White House days.” One was about LBJ. The women carried on and laughed. Jacka recalled, “My wife and I are just a couple of country kids and here we were listening to all these revelations about the high life in Washington.” Tempelsman, Stewart and Lee Udall, and Jackie, with Jerry and Lois Jacka in front of them, all posed comfortably together, however, for a snapshot on their hike with Canyon de Chelly in the background.

  “Stewart wanted to take them into a beautiful canyon,” Jacka continued. “We stayed that night at the Thunderbird Lodge, a nice place, but we were out late, and when we got back the café at the Thunderbird was closed. We had to stop at a little dive in Chinle, Arizona, for supper. It was fairly clean. There were just a few tables covered in oilcloth. We had Navajo tacos. Jackie had ice cream to follow, because the tacos were a little hot. A Navajo woman came out, bringing with her a little girl, and said to Jackie, ‘Will you shake hands with my daughter?’ ”

  When they stopped for lunch, they each had a plastic cup of wine to celebrate having made it to the other side on a difficult crossing of the Black River. The Jackas went as far as Acoma Pueblo, a historic Navajo community believed to have been continuously inhabited since the twelfth century. Jacka remembered that Jackie “was a delightful sport. At Acoma, rather than go up the tourist trail to the pueblo, the tribe gave us permission to go up the old hand-carved stairway in the stone, which probably dated back to the time of Coronado.” The Jackas left at Acoma, and a prominent Native American artist, Lloyd Kiva New, and his wife joined the party and took them beyond that to Santa Fe.

  It was a spectacular trip for Jackie, and she told the Udalls she had been “absolutely knocked out by the beauty of all that we saw. It affected me much more deeply than going to India.” She also confessed that although they had shared the experience of working together in Washington, she hadn’t really known them then. “What made me happiest about this trip was really becoming friends—with so many wonderful things ahead to look forward to.” Jackie and the Udalls did become friends. When Stewart and Lee Udall went to New York, they often had supper with Jackie and Tempelsman. This did not stop the editor and the writer from arguing over Udall’s book manuscript, however. Perhaps it helped them, as we only really argue with people we like. It also shows the new, more confident woman that Jackie had become.

  (photo credit 11.2)

  The trouble centered on the “revisionist essay” on the Coronado trail that Udall wanted in his book. His argument was that compared with the historical record of the others who conquered and settled what would become the United States, the Spanish settlement was “more humane, more compassionate.” Jackie objected. She thought to call Spanish colonizers “compassionate” was to ignore the record of the Spanish Inquisition as well as related Spanish crimes in Latin America and elsewhere. “I wish you would rewrite it,” she told Udall in a five-page, single-spaced letter with her detailed criticisms. Using a colloquial idiom, she wrote, “You can’t brush off the Inquisition in half a sentence, as an unfair rap that has been laid on the Spaniards.” She thought his argument would open the book to criticism. She also objected to his writing of the “myth of Spanish cruelty.” She pointed out that “they were cruel to some Indians, they love bullfights, the Indian population of Latin America has been decimated today … Just stop pushing here.” She wanted something more understated, because fundamentally she agreed with him and admired much of the Spanish tradition in the Americas. She even said that she “used to wish the Spanish instead of the Puritans had colonized New England.” At the end of this long letter, in which she was as tough with Udall as she was with any of her other authors, she softened her remarks by writing, “Give my love to Lee. Happy Valentine’s Day,” and drew in a little heart. A year later, when the book was ready to come out, she wrote to ask for a copy of his signature to go on a bag that would be handed out as a promotional gift at a Doubleday sales conference. “Only the Most Important authors go on it,” she wrote in teasing capital letters.

  Doubleday published To the Inland Empire: Coronado and Our Spanish Legacy in 1987. It is a handsome book with spectacular color photographs, dedicated to the wives of Udall and Jacka, Lee and Lois, as well as to Jackie, “the three who made it happen.” The book has the marked nostalgic element that is a feature of so many of Jackie’s books. In the conclusion, Udall quotes from an Archibald MacLeish poem that imagined the thoughts of the sixteenth-century conquistador Bernal Díaz when he returned to Spain from America, near death, and reflected on the boldness of his expedition to another continent:

  I: poor as I am: I was young in that country:

  These words were my life: these letters written

  Cold on the page with the spilt ink and the shunt of the

  Stubborn thumb: these marks at my fingers:

  These are the shape of my own life .…

  and I hunted the

  Unknown birds in the west with their beautiful wings!

  This was Udall reflecting on the metaphorical birds with their beautiful wings of his own former career as well. His book was the cause for at least one political reunion, as Jackie invited a whole range of Kennedy-era appointees and cabinet members to the book party at Doubleday, and the Washington Post ran highlights of the party’s guest list. The Spanish government honored Udall by knighting him.

  Jackie shared some of Udall’s trips down memory lane. But it wasn’t JFK’s Camelot to which she gave tribute in this book so much as it was her own. Another of her literary themes, the decisive presence of European influence and culture in American history, had attracted her to Udall’s story in the first place. What was even more important to her was to have made new friends outside her marriage to her first husband, to have explored new territory with the Udalls, to have met artists like Jerry Jacka and Lloyd Kiva New, and to have produced a book remarkable for its stunning photography. She wrote to the Udalls in 1993, “Please tell Lloyd I still have his red shirt that he gave me—in fact I wore it two days ago.” When Jackie’s cancer was announced to the press early in 1994, Lee Udall wrote to Jackie to express concern. To reassure Lee that everything was fine and she mustn’t worry, Jackie
said that she was still wearing Lloyd Kiva New’s red denim shirt. She added, “You gave me one of the most heart-stopping experiences of my love [sic; she meant “life”] and I love you both for it.”

  Crossing Swords with Alabama’s George Wallace

  Jackie could spend hours poring over glossy photographs of vermeil cutlery with John Loring, but she also wanted to publish the history of inequality and racism in America. In two books she preserved not only episodes in the career of JFK but also some of the political ideas of Robert Kennedy, who became especially concerned about race and poverty in his political career after his brother’s death. Neither work was merely a tribute to brothers whom she had loved, however. They were also her selections of particular stories and personalities that appealed to her.

  Carl Elliott was an eight-term Democratic member of the House of Representatives who served between 1949 and 1965. He spoke on behalf of the poor, especially coal miners in his district, since he himself had made it through the University of Alabama on a special program that allowed poor students to defray their tuition by working. He worked on the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which helped more students enter college via a student loan program. He eventually lost his seat because of redistricting and staked all his savings on running for governor against Lurleen Wallace in the 1960s. She was running as a proxy for her husband, George Wallace, who had already served the maximum number of successive terms under the state’s law. The election was hard fought. The pro-segregationist Wallace sent Ku Klux Klan members to appear at Elliott’s election rallies, and there were threats of violence. Elliott lost, and later borrowed from his government pension to pay for his election campaign. He then retired into renewed poverty and obscurity, until 1990, when the John F. Kennedy Library, under Jackie’s and Caroline Kennedy’s auspices, instituted the Profiles in Courage Award. The idea was to memorialize JFK’s prizewinning book, Profiles in Courage, and recognize the courage of living politicians who had put principle before self-interest. Carl Elliott was the first winner. Though confined to a wheelchair, he went to Boston to accept the award from Jackie, Caroline, and Ted Kennedy.