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

by Caroline Kennedy

PRESIDENT KENNEDY AND DAVE POWERS, 1961

  Abbie Rowe, National Park Service/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

  THE KENNEDYS WITH BEN AND TONY BRADLEE IN THE WEST SITTING HALL OF THE WHITE HOUSE

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

  Best parties I've ever attended. Weren't they great? The greatest girls, the nicest times. Everyone was so much better than normal. Everyone was the gayest and prettiest and nicest.

  And it was a mixture of cabinet and friends from New York, and young people. And I worked so hard on those parties because I felt once we were in the White House, I felt that I could get out, and I just can't tell you how oppressive the strain of the White House can be. I could go out and whenever Jack saw it was getting me down a little bit he'd really send me away—not exactly, but he'd say, "Why don't you go up to New York, or go see your sister in Italy?" And then he sent me to Greece, which was, you know, for a sad reason this year, but he thought I was getting depressed after losing Patrick.34 I thought, I can go out, I can go to a restaurant in New York or walk down the street and look at an antique shop or go to a nightclub. You've heard of the Twist, or something—not that you care about nightclubs—and I don't want to go more than once a year—but Jack couldn't get out. So then I used to try to make these parties to bring gay, and new people, and music, and make it happy nights. And did he love them.

  He loved them. Danced very rarely, but loved to—

  Just walked around, puffing his cigar.

  Talked to the girls—make Oleg dance the Twist. Or Steve or somebody. 35

  Yeah, then he'd move on very quickly. You know, to sort of see everyone.

  He did have an extraordinary range of acquaintance and ability to enter in—to, sympathetically—to people of the whole range of the spectrum.

  Yeah, that's so true, because the luckiest thing I used to think about him, you know, when we were early married and then later, was whatever you were interested in, Jack got interested in. When I started to be interested in French furniture, he got so interested in it, and then he'd be so proud, he'd go to Joe Alsop's36 and recognize Louis XVI and Louis XV. And I started to collect drawings, and then he wanted to know about them. And he got interested in animals, or horses. Or then, when I was reading all this eighteenth century, he'd snatch a book from me and read and know all of Louis XV's mistresses before I would. So many of the senators, when we'd go out to dinner—senators and embassies this first year—all those men would ever talk to me about was themselves. And Jack was so interested—maybe it's Gemini, or what?37 And once I asked him, the month before we were married in Newport, what he thought his best and his worst qualities were. And he thought his best quality was curiosity, which, I think he was right. He thought his worst was irritability, but, I mean, he was never irritable with me. I think by that he meant impatience. You know, he didn't like to be bored, and if someone was boring, he'd pick up the newspaper, but he certainly wasn't irritable to live with.

  WEDDING OF JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY AND JACQUELINE LEE BOUVIER, SEPTEMBER 12, 1953

  John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

  He was not irritable in the current White House sense.38 No, I've just not seen anyone—from South Boston through Harvard to Palm Beach—he was at home in a greater variety of things and, as you say, made people from each of these kind of segments feel that he was with them. It was an extraordinary—

  Yeah, then they'd all get interested in politics and things. You know, there's never been such a universal president before. It doesn't mean absolutely anything, but in the Washington Post the other day, I read the theater page—and Alain Delon, who's this little French "jeune premier" young movie star now, came to Washington. And so the drama critic went to interview him, and all he could talk about was Jack. And say, you know, how "all we young people"—well, I mean, there's a little sexy young French movie actor and he's so wounded by Jack. It's because Jack was young, and loved—you know—everything—elegance, girls, you know, in all the best senses of the word. It was like he had many things in common with that young man, the same way he'd have, you know, things in common with so many sides of you. Everyone found a part of him in Jack. Before that, politics was just left to all the corny old people who shouted on the Fourth of July—and you know, all the things that made me so bored with politics.

  He gave youth and intellect and taste a world voice, which was felt all around the world, and he had this extraordinary combination of idealism and realism, which—

  That's again—the Kennedys taught me all this—Jack, really—all this questioning, questioning. You know, if you didn't get on the offensive, they'd have you on the defensive all night. And so these questions he'd ask me or my sister—so once I asked him how he'd define himself, and he said, "An idealist without illusions."

  Um-hmm. That's perfect.

  Then once somebody asked me about him, and I said that—I saw that attributed to myself. But Jack said it.

  In the senatorial years, whom would you see most of? In the Senate, I mean.

  Well, in the senatorial years, when you think Jack was away every weekend, and so you'd have three or four days a week, two of which he'd be tired—but the ones we'd see—I remember little dinners—who would you have? The Symingtons, Smatherses, Coopers—they were always—funnily enough, John Sherman Cooper and Lorraine.39

  He's the nicest man in the Senate.

  Yeah, I guess.

  Not Hubert particularly?40

  No, I never saw—the only ones I can remember having to dinner at our house the first year we lived on Dent Place—3327 Dent Place—we rented from the Childses41—I can remember having the Symingtons, Smatherses, and Coopers for dinner and—those are the only senators I can think of—oh, and Mansfield42 sometimes. The year before, 1960, then you'd have others—I remember we had McCarthy—Eugene McCarthy43 and a couple of others, I can't remember.

  Johnson, ever?44

  Never.

  You mentioned the Chicago convention—a couple of unsatisfactory conversations with Stevenson. Of course, the Stevenson-Kennedy relationship has always been a puzzle and slightly a sadness to me, because I think if the President ever saw Stevenson in a genuinely relaxed mood, he would have quite liked him, because he can be awfully engaging. But somehow, Stevenson would always freeze and become sort of prissy and so on with the President.

  Well, this is all retrospect, but I always thought that every time Stevenson—Stevenson just let Jack down so many times. So, you know, Jack really worked hard for him and everything, and he wasn't nice to him at that convention. I remember he had a meeting with Stevenson before Stevenson threw it open—maybe the point of that meeting was—I don't know, I'm just thinking—was he hoping that Stevenson would ask him to be vice president, or what? Then I think—I don't know whether Stevenson—but I think this about so many people—Jack made them jealous.

  I think eventually he made Stevenson deeply jealous because Stevenson saw the President taking away not only the nomination, but also many of his own supporters and doing really better than he had ever been able to, the kinds of things he most wanted to do. But in '56, I don't know—I think it's partly a generational thing, Stevenson was fifteen years older.45

  Well, I see that with more people who were bitter about Jack while he was President. And then you hear about it. For instance, one is Scotty Reston.46 And someone very close to him told me it was a jealousy of generations. He couldn't bear to see someone younger, or maybe his age, come on. So Jack incited that—and Dean Acheson47 the same way. And then there was also a jealousy of contemporaries, because someone who was just Jack's age, and sitting behind some little bank clerk's desk and hanging around the bar at Bailey's Beach48 would just feel that he was a nothing when he saw all that Jack was doing. So he incited so many bitter jealousies, and they were the ones who'd say mean things about him. And I thought Stevenson was really horrible to Jack at the convention in 1960. When Jack asked him—was it in the
Oregon primary?—to come out for him, or to pull out of it?49 But he had been asking him things all spring, and Stevenson was just—Oh, I know what Stevenson said to him, that he couldn't do it because he couldn't be disloyal to Lyndon Johnson or something.

  That's right. I was an intermediary. There were a number of intermediaries, I'm sure. But I talked to Stevenson a couple of times that winter and spring on the President's behalf—and Stevenson's answer was that he had told Lyndon Johnson in 1959 that he would remain neutral and would not come out for any candidate, and that he had to keep his word to Lyndon Johnson.

  But then, I remember one night Jack coming home and rather—not rudely but with that sort of laugh he had, telling me that's what Stevenson had told him, and he thought that Stevenson was hoping to be named as running mate with Johnson. And then he told me something so insulting that Johnson had said to him the day before about Stevenson. You know, he was thinking, "How silly can this man be?" But Jack knew then, I think—I mean, he knew that he was going to get the nomination.

  I think Stevenson, although he would not admit it to himself or to anybody else, was holding out for a deadlock in which he would be the presidential candidate. I doubt that he would have wanted to go on as a vice presidential candidate. But he wouldn't admit this, and so we people who had been for him in '52 and '56, as I had, would ask him whether he was a candidate. He would say he was not a candidate, and that released me, I felt, from any obligation. But in all this period, you know, if you've won twice, you keep hoping.

  Yeah, oh, it's hard for him. But, you know, he just never had the breadth or depth that Jack did. You know, I just see it all now.

  Someone once said that Stevenson was a Greek and Kennedy a Roman.

  No. I think Kennedy was a Greek and Stevenson was a, well—

  Kennedy was an Athenian and Stevenson from Thebes.50 [laughs]

  [laughs] Yes, I don't know, he was a little— He was all right, Stevenson. I mean, he was the first time anyone spoke anything in politics that you could listen—the first time anyone brought anything intellectual to politics.

  He helped prepare the way. He helped open up the situation, and the President came along as a kind of climax.

  But he couldn't make—I mean, there's no point to talk about Stevenson. Where he couldn't make decisions, or he'd go over his little papers, or he'd carefully take something typewritten and copy it in longhand because he was so proud of everyone saying he wrote all his speeches—I don't know, poor man. It's sort of sad. You know, Jack achieved all he dreamed of in his life, and it must be sad not to have.51

  It is sad. After the convention in '56, the President was quite relieved, was he—in not having got—immediately so—I know later, he would say often how pleased he was.

  It's funny. There was just—I remember watching it with Michael Forrestal.52 I'd gone to get a Coca-Cola or something, down underneath all those seats, and as I was coming back, suddenly that race started, and all the blackboards, the numbers started changing. I bumped into Michael Forrestal, and he grabbed me into a Westinghouse exhibit, and we watched the whole thing on television. And then we went to Jack's room at the Stockade Inn, or whatever it was?

  Yes, Stockyards Inn.53

  But he was just let down, like in any fight, and when he went on to say that—and do it so beautifully—just a little let down. Then we flew back—I can't remember if it was that afternoon or the next day—and then he wasn't anymore—he was just exhausted.

  Do you remember who were the closest to him at that point at the convention? Torb and Bobby, and Ted Sorensen, I imagine.

  Yeah, was he taking a bath over there and watching it on television? I guess, those three. They'd know what other people were. It was in that little room, you know, right out in back, and there was someone else there too—I have to think who—I can't remember.

  And then, after '56, by the time he ran for the Senate in '58, he was quite clearly going to try for the presidency in 1960.

  Well, he never once said to me in all his life, before we started the primary year, "I'm going to try for the presidency," or not. You know, it just went on. But of course he was, because then he came back— After the convention, he flew to Europe to stay with his father and just rest a few days in the South of France. And I lost the baby and he came back to Newport54 a couple of weeks. Then we came down and lived at Hickory Hill that fall, while we were finding another house, but he was always on the move. And all that winter, he was on the move. And so, obviously, all that speaking, speaking, speaking, yes, he was aiming—yeah, I guess he did decide then.

  I remember suddenly realizing it when he was so determined to win the Massachusetts senatorial race in '58 by the largest possible margin.55 It was perfectly clear he was going to win, and therefore it wasn't very necessary for him to campaign, but he worked so hard in that campaign.

  Yeah, I remember when we came back on the boat from Europe, someone met us with a poll of how Foster Furcolo56 was doing. Would that be it? Jack's polls weren't so good. [talk about tape recorder] So then there was this major, frantic effort. Somehow that seems to me the hardest campaign of ever—that Senate campaign.

  JOHN F. KENNEDY CAMPAIGNING FOR REELECTION TO THE SENATE WITH JACQUELINE KENNEDY AND EDWARD M. KENNEDY

  John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

  You mean, just the extent of more—

  I mean just I never can remember sleeping at home for however many months it was. Two months, I guess. But you know, just running, running.

  All those teas.

  Mostly just endless cars. It was awful. Oh yeah, with Professor Burns,57 and Jack telling him who to shake hands with on platforms, but all through the Berkshires, through Springfield, different hotels, you know.

  Do you like campaigning?

  I do—until you get exhausted. You know, about the fifth day out, it's just sheer exhaustion, and then, you know—I love it when it's going wonderfully—I love it when it's going wonderfully for Jack.

  There's nothing more exciting than entering a crowded hall and watching the candidate come in, everyone going mad.

  Yeah, well, all that part I loved, and towards the end, it was getting better and better.

  We ended up, I think, last time talking about the Senate, in which the President was reelected by this great majority and which, for the first time, made him sort of nationally spoken of as a possible contender for 1960. Did that—was it already—was that becoming, a kind of, do you think, a preoccupation in his own life, and yours and so on? Was everything sort of directed more and more to that?

  Do you mean to being president?

  Yeah.

  Well, it was never spoken of out loud, but after election night in Boston1—I think we went somewhere in the sun or sometime, but then he started speaking all the time. Again, all those years before the White House—every weekend he was always traveling. You know, invitations from all over the country—and then they led up to the primaries, which were what, just 1960?

  Nineteen-sixty.

  It seems the thing went on forever.

  During these times when he was out, like the 1958 campaign and so on, how did—he kept up reading and so on. How and when did he do that?

  Well, he read in the strangest way. I mean, I could never read unless I'd have a rainy afternoon or a long evening in bed, or something. He'd read walking, he'd read at the table, at meals, he'd read after dinner, he'd read in the bathtub, he'd read—prop open a book on his desk—on his bureau—while he was doing his tie. You know, he'd just read in little, he'd open some book I'd be reading, you know, just devour it. He really read all the times you don't think you have time to read.

  READING IN HYANNIS PORT, 1959

  ©2000 Mark Shaw/mptvimages.com

  He'd read in short takes, and then remember it and come back and pick up a thread?

  Anything he wanted to remember, he could always remember. You'd see things he'd use in his speeches. You'd be sitting next to him on some platform, an
d suddenly out would come a sentence that two weeks ago in Georgetown he would have read out loud to you one night, just because it interested him.

  He had the most fantastic and maddening memory for quotes, because—while he remembered the quotes, but he couldn't always remember where they were from.

  I remember the winter he was sick. His father had a whole shelf of books—The World's Great Orations or something that his father had given him and he'd read every single one of those books, and then I made—I asked his father to give them to him for Christmas, which, of course, he was delighted to do. But he'd been through every one of those. And he used to read me Edmund Burke's "To the"—what is it?

  The address to—

  "To the People of—"

  Bristol.2

  That's it, and well, all things through there, you know, he just—of course, that was a different winter. He'd just have days and days in bed to go through all that.