Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy

by Caroline Kennedy

  She felt strongly that as our capital city, Washington, D.C., should reflect America's newly prominent place in the world. She fought to preserve Lafayette Square, and launched the effort to rehabilitate Pennsylvania Avenue—an effort that has been sustained ever since. My mother understood that the past was a source of pride for people around the world, just as it is in America, and convinced my father that the United States could build goodwill among countries like Egypt, with which we had political differences, by assisting in their historic preservation efforts. Her persistence resulted in a generous U.S. contribution to the UNESCO rescue of the temples of Abu Simbel, which were threatened by the construction of the Aswan Dam, and favorably impressed the Nasser regime. In another example of cultural diplomacy, my mother was responsible for the Mona Lisa's visit to the United States, the only time the painting has ever left the Louvre.

  Most important, she believed her responsibility was to help my father in every way she could. Although she became a diplomatic and even a political asset, she never thought she deserved the title "First Lady," which she disliked anyway, claiming it sounded like the name of a racehorse. But she was deeply patriotic and proud of what she accomplished, and my father was proud of her too. Their time in the White House was the happiest of her life.

  Given the important role Jacqueline Kennedy played in the presidency of John F. Kennedy and its aftermath, it seemed a disservice to let her perspective remain absent from the public and scholarly debate that would accompany the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy administration. Fifty years seems a sufficient time for passions to have cooled, yet recent enough that the world described still has much to teach us. The sense of time passing was made more acute by the loss of my uncle Teddy and my aunt Eunice in 2009, by Ted Sorensen in 2010, and my uncle Sarge in January 2011.

  But, before making the final decision, I asked my children to read the transcripts and tell me what they thought. Their reactions were not so different from my own. They found the conversations dated in many ways—but fascinating in many more. They loved the stories about their grandfather, and how insightful yet irreverent their grandmother was. They were puzzled by some of Arthur Schlesinger's questions—personal rivalries he pursued and particular issues that have not stood the test of time. They wished that he had asked more questions about her.

  But they came away with the same conclusions that I had reached—there was no significant reason to put off publication and no one speaks better for my mother than she does herself.

  —NEW YORK, 2011

  INTRODUCTION

  by Michael Beschloss

  So now, at long last, it is her turn to speak. If you pore through the thousands of books about John Fitzgerald Kennedy, you will find the voice of one crucial witness virtually absent. As the New York Times obituary said the morning after her death on May 19, 1994, "Her silence about her past, especially about the Kennedy years and her marriage to the President, was always something of a mystery." She wrote no autobiography or memoir.

  Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born on July 28, 1929, in Southampton, New York, the summer family seat of both her paternal and maternal lines. Her suntanned, Yale-educated, French-American father, John V. Bouvier III, had followed his forefathers to Wall Street; his career never recovered from the stock market crash of 1929. Her mother, Janet Norton Lee, was the daughter of a self-made Irish-American tycoon in New York banking and real estate. From her Park Avenue and Long Island childhood, Jackie (she preferred Jacqueline, but friends and family rarely used her full given name) liked to ride horses, create whimsical drawings, and read books—especially art history, poetry, French history, and literature. When she was twelve, her parents were bitterly divorced, and her mother wed Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr., a Standard Oil heir, who made Jackie and her younger sister, Lee, at home on his picturesque estates in McLean, Virginia, and Newport, Rhode Island. As a student at Miss Porter's School (Farmington) in Connecticut, where she boarded her horse Danseuse, teachers found Jackie strong-willed, irreverent, and highly intelligent.

  After two years at Vassar, which did not inspire her, the young woman sprang to life during a junior year at the Sorbonne and the University of Grenoble. Returning to live at Merrywood, her stepfather's house on the Potomac, she was graduated in 1951 from George Washington University and surpassed twelve hundred other college women to win Vogue's Prix de Paris, for which she designed a sample issue of the magazine and wrote an essay on "People I Wish I Had Known" (Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, and Sergei Diaghilev). The prize offered a year as a Vogue junior editor in New York and Paris. She declined it—to the relief of her mother, who was inclined to take her daughter's strong interest in France as an unwelcome sign of allegiance to Jack Bouvier. Instead Jackie took a job as "Inquiring Photographer" for the Washington Times-Herald. In that role, she began seeing the man who would become her husband.

  The first time she had met Jack Kennedy was in 1948, on a train from Washington, D.C., to New York when, as she recorded at the time, she briefly chatted with an attentive "tall thin young congressman with very long reddish hair." But the encounter came to naught. That same year, her family friend Charles Bartlett took her "across this great crowd" at his brother's Long Island wedding to meet Jack Kennedy, but "by the time I got her across, why, he'd left." Finally in the spring of 1951, in Bartlett and his wife Martha's Georgetown dining room, Jack and Jackie had their official introduction. After what she called "a spasmodic courtship," the Francophile aesthete and the fast-ascending senator from Massachusetts married in Newport on September 12, 1953, launching the decade of their life that you will read about in this book.

  During the months after John Kennedy's murder, his thirty-four-year-old widow found memories of their White House life, which she calls in this volume "our happiest years," so traumatic that she asked her Secret Service drivers to please arrange her trips so that she would never accidentally glimpse the old mansion. She intended to stay away from the White House for the rest of her life—and she did, with only one exception. (In 1971, when Aaron Shikler finished his official portraits of the thirty-fifth president and his wife, she agreed to make a very private visit with her children to the White House, where they viewed the portraits and dined with President Richard Nixon and his family.) At the end of 1963, Mrs. Kennedy feared that reminiscing at length about life with her husband would make her "start to cry again," but she was determined to win Jack a fair hearing from historians. Since JFK had been deprived of the chance afforded other presidents of defending their historical record in books, articles, and public comments, she felt an overwhelming obligation to do whatever she could. To ensure that he was not forgotten, within days of Dallas, Jackie was already trying to imagine the architecture of a future Kennedy Library—planned for Harvard, on a Charles River site selected by the President just a month before he died.

  At the start of December 1963, when the widow and her children had not yet departed their White House quarters, her husband's aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., amassed some of the most moving letters he had received about his late boss and sent them upstairs to the widow. The bow-tied Schlesinger, known for "his acid wit and a magnificent bounce to his step," was an ex–Harvard history professor, one of the nation's most respected scholars, author of award-winning books on the "ages" of Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt, and speechwriter during Adlai Stevenson's two campaigns for president. He had known JFK since they were Harvard students together, but his friendship with Jackie had really begun during the 1960 presidential campaign, when her husband, wishing not to be seen encircled by liberal academics, had asked Schlesinger to send him tactical advice through her. Now, in the wake of the assassination, the historian was already planning research for the book on the thirty-fifth presidency that JFK and his other aides had always presumed that Schlesinger would one day write.

  From her White House rooms, Jacqueline replied in longhand to Schlesinger's note: "I return your letters—I am so happy to have seen them—I have not
had time to read any yet." She wrote that someone had urged that the Kennedy Library try to sustain her husband's influence on the young: "Well I don't see how it can keep going without him—but you could think of a way—it would be nice to try." She told Schlesinger she had been "very impressed" by an address he had given about her husband: "It was all the things I thought about Jack—even though he didn't live to see his dreams accomplished—he so badly wanted to be a great President—I think he still can be—because he started those ideas—which is what you said. And he should be great for that." She urged Schlesinger to write about him soon, "while all is fresh—while you still remember his exact words."

  As Schlesinger later recalled, an oral history project was "much on my mind after Dallas, and also on Robert Kennedy's mind." At Harvard, he had been an early champion of this new research method. Anxious that important historical evidence was getting lost because people were writing fewer letters and diaries, pioneers at Columbia University and elsewhere were interviewing historical figures, taping the conversations, and placing the transcripts in public archives. As "a matter of urgency," Schlesinger reminded Jacqueline that—in contrast to Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, who kept diaries and wrote surprisingly revealing letters—John Kennedy's leadership was often exercised on the telephone or in person, leaving no written record.1 Without a "crash" oral history program, capturing memories from New Frontiersmen while still recent, much of the Kennedy history would disappear. In January 1964, Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy approved a plan for scholars and members of the Kennedy circle to record the recollections of "thousands" of people who knew the President—relatives, friends, cabinet secretaries, Massachusetts pols, foreign leaders, and others who had enjoyed "more than a perfunctory" relationship with him. Along with RFK's own oral history, the centerpiece of the collection would be interviews with John Kennedy's widow, which would be performed by Schlesinger himself.

  ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.

  George Tames/The New York Times/Redux

  Thus on Monday, March 2, 1964, Schlesinger walked to Jacqueline Kennedy's new home at 3017 N Street and climbed the long flight of wooden steps to start the first of seven interviews with the former First Lady. In her grief, Mrs. Kennedy had bought this 1794 house, which stood across the street from what was once Robert Todd Lincoln's. She was doing her best to provide a normal life for six-year-old Caroline and three-year-old John, which she saw as both her duty and her salvation. Tourist buses stopped outside throughout the day (and sometimes night), disgorging sightseers who littered her steps, pointed Instamatic cameras at her front windows, and called out her children's names, forcing her to keep the curtains in her freshly painted white living room closed.

  Inside the house, passing through sliding doors, Schlesinger joined Jacqueline in the living room, whose bookshelves displayed artifacts from ancient Rome, Egypt, and Greece that President Kennedy had given her over the years. Facing away from the front windows, she liked to sit on a crushed-velvet sofa. Atop a three-tiered table beside her were two framed photographs: the smiling JFK beside his desk, clapping while his children danced, another of him campaigning among a crowd. Placing his tape recorder beside a silver cigarette box on a low black Oriental table, Schlesinger would have sat to Mrs. Kennedy's right on a pale yellow chair he had seen upstairs at the White House. He urged her to speak as though addressing "an historian of the twenty-first century." As he later recalled, "From time to time, she would ask me to turn off the machine so that she could say what she wanted to say, and then ask, Should I say that on the recorder?' . . . In general, what I would say was, Why don't you say it? . . . You have control over the transcript.'" During this and the next six sittings, starting with a quavering voice that grew stronger with time, Jacqueline unburdened herself as the tape machine also picked up the sounds of her lighting cigarettes, of ice cubes in glasses, dogs barking in the distance, trucks rumbling down N Street, and jets roaring overhead.

  PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY WITH CAROLINE AND JOHN IN THE OVAL OFFICE

  Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

  For anyone who doubts Jacqueline Kennedy's emotional self-discipline, note that during these months of her greatest despair, she could will herself to speak in such detail about her vanished former life. And Schlesinger was not even her only interlocutor that spring. In April 1964, she sat for hours at night in that same parlor to be questioned by William Manchester, who was researching his authorized book about the assassination. In order to spare Mrs. Kennedy the agony of twice recounting those events, Schlesinger left the task to Manchester. Nevertheless, on the June day after she completed her final interview with Schlesinger, she was forced to sit in that same room to be questioned by members of the Warren Commission about her husband's final motorcade.

  Read after almost a half century, the interviews in this book revise scene after scene of the history of the 1950s and early 1960s that we thought we knew. While no such work ever tells the entire story, this oral history constitutes a fresh internal narrative of John Kennedy's life as senator, candidate, and President, and his wife's experience of those years, providing new detail on what JFK and Jacqueline privately said to each other, her backstage role in his political life, diplomacy, and world crises, and her definite and consistently original views about the changing cast of characters who surrounded them both. The close student of the Kennedy years knows how Jackie expanded her husband's range with her command of French and Spanish, her knowledge about the history of Europe and its colonies, her background in the arts. But even today, many presume that she was relatively indifferent to political life. When Schlesinger met her at Hyannis Port in 1959, like others at the time, he found her "flighty on politics," asking elementary questions with "wide-eyed naivete." This behavior was not surprising, because well-bred young women of Jacqueline's generation were not encouraged to sound like intellectuals. Nor would it help her husband for her to vent her more caustic opinions around anyone but their most trusted friends. But as this oral history confirms, she knew considerably more about John Kennedy's political life than she let on to outsiders, and her influence on his official relationships was substantial.

  Jacqueline Kennedy would have been the last person—during these interviews or later—to suggest that she was some kind of hidden White House policy guru. As she conveys in this volume, she considered it her role not to badger her husband about labor safety or international law, as Eleanor Roosevelt had with Franklin, but to provide JFK with a "climate of affection," with intriguing dinner guests, appealing food, and "the children in good moods," to help him escape the pressures of leading the Free World through one of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War. To the surprise of both President and First Lady—as this oral history shows, they had both worried that voters would find her too effete—she became, with her beauty and star quality, a huge political asset. Legions of American women wanted to walk, talk, dress, wear their hair, and furnish their homes like Jackie. It was not casually that in the fall of 1963, the President lobbied her to join him on campaign trips to Texas and California. On his final morning, before an audience in Fort Worth, he joked about his wife's popular appeal, mock-complaining that "nobody wonders what Lyndon and I wear!"2

  As First Lady, Mrs. Kennedy was not a feminist, at least as the word is understood today. Betty Friedan's pathbreaking The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, but the full-fledged women's movement was almost a decade away. In this book, Mrs. Kennedy suggests that women should find their sense of purpose through their husbands, and that the old-fashioned style of marriage is "the best." She describes her first White House social secretary as "sort of a feminist" and thus "so different from me." She even observes that women should stay out of politics because they are too "emotional" (views that by the 1970s she emphatically dropped). Despite such utterances, no one can argue that this First Lady did not make her own strong-minded choices about her life and work. Resisting those who counseled her to emula
te her more conventional predecessors, she made it clear from the start that her supreme job was not to attend charity events or political banquets but to raise her children well amid the blast of attention around a president's family. And other public projects she undertook at no one's behest but her own. Through the run of these interviews, Mrs. Kennedy gives short shrift to those achievements. This is because Schlesinger's oral histories were intended to focus on her husband, and because, in 1964, even so knowing an historian as Schlesinger regarded a First Lady's story as a side event, which caused him to treat Jacqueline primarily as a source on her husband. This is unfortunate because among the First Ladies of the twentieth century, probably only Eleanor Roosevelt had a greater impact on the Americans of her time.

  One of Jacqueline Kennedy's contributions was to herald the importance of historical preservation. The 1950s and 1960s were a period when American architects and city planners were eager to raze urban monuments and neighborhoods that seemed dated in order to make room for new highways, office buildings, stadiums, and public housing. Without Mrs. Kennedy's intervention, some of Washington, D.C.'s crown jewels would have met a similar fate—for example, Lafayette Square, facing the White House, which Pierre L'Enfant, the original architect of Washington, D.C., had envisaged as "the President's park." A plan was in fast motion to destroy almost all of the nineteenth-century houses and buildings on the east and west sides of Lafayette Park, including the mansion of Dolley Madison's widowhood and the 1861 building that had been the capital's first art museum. In their place would go "modern" white marble federal office towers that would dwarf the White House.