These are our U.S. ambassadors, about to go overseas.
Yes. And one was going to Africa, and one was going to the Near East—I don't know, Lebanon or Turkey or somewhere. And these sort of precious flits came in his office and he was just so—you know, it was the wrong idea of the kind of people he wanted to be sent out there anyway. He wanted a more rugged America sent. And he called up Rusk the minute the last one had left his office—I guess there weren't three in a day, but say, three over a week—and said, "I want you to send out a memo to everyone in the Foreign Service that not one of them can wear a slave bracelet anymore."38 But, you know, those were the kind of people who took Rusk over in the end. And he cared so about the little—like where was Rusk? He wasn't in on either part of the missile crisis or something terribly important because he'd have to go to a—
Nassau—
Oh, Nassau—
He did not go to Nassau because he had to go to a dinner for the foreign ambassadors—the annual diplomatic dinner for the foreign ambassadors in Washington.
Yeah, well, little things like that, I mean, he turned into—I mean, Jack said one terrific thing about Angie Duke, who he was so proud of in a way, because Angie does have the most beautiful manners in the world and did so much helping all that way. But Angie wanted to get out of being chief of protocol, and Jack was so surprised where Angie wanted to go. It was Tanganyika. And Jack thought he would have wanted—
Denmark.
Yeah, that he was—sort of wanted to be a Bill Blair, going to eternal parties. He was rather disillusioned at Bill Blair for that, by the way. But you know, he said, "I'm not sure Angie's quite up to Tanganyika." But he was very impressed that he wanted to go where life could be rugged, and as I said, "What about Africans?" And another thing about Dean Rusk. You know, Jack was very formal. He never called anyone by their first names until he really knew them well. And Dean Rusk was the one member of his cabinet—probably because he was older and he hadn't known him before—who he called "Mr. Rusk," right up until the last year. And suddenly one day, they broke down and he called him "Dean." But people don't know that he was that. It was part of his English—admiration for things English. He never liked it if anyone called you "Jack," or me "Jackie," or—except in the campaign, when they yell it. But then it's a sign of liking you. And he never would call anyone— He always called my mother and stepfather "Mr. and Mrs. Auchincloss."
Oh, really?
He called my mother "Mummy," because he thought it was such a funny name—as sort of a joke. But he always called my father "Mr. Bouvier."
He never called your mother "Janet"?
Never. And yet, you know, he knew them so well. But he just—he didn't think it was right.
What about some of the other people in the State Department? George Ball?39
Well, I can't exactly remember what, but I can remember he wasn't always entirely pleased with George Ball.
And of course, poor old Chester.
Oh, yeah, Chester. Chester Bowles would give some endless talk in a meeting about we should enslave—take the mud huts out of enslavement and raise the standard of the, blah—you know, go on with these rolling phrases for hours, and then Jack would say, "Yes, Chester, but I'm not asking you that. I'm asking you what we should do about this problem—X-Y-Z." Something rather simple, and Chester would never have an answer. And so he couldn't wait to get him out of there.
Averell he liked.
Yes, Averell he did like. Walt Rostow40—it was funny, one night I was at a seminar at the Dillons. Jack was out of town, and making a speech somewhere, and he called me up, and I was called out of the room, and he said, "What's the seminar?" And I said, "It's Walt Rostow, talking about underdeveloped countries." And a lot of people like you, and Bundy, and everyone were there. And he said—so loudly, I had to put my hand over the receiver—"Jesus Christ! You mean all those people are—Walt Rostow's got all those people trapped in there, listening to him?" Because he really thought Walt Rostow went on and on, and was hard to listen to. He said, "I'm glad I'm not at that seminar." But he liked him. He never said anything mean about him. He said Jerome Wiesner always used to peek through his door.41 He'd come around through Mrs. Lincoln's office and peek—he said it used to drive him crazy. Every time the door would be open, Wiesner's head would peek in and out, and it would finally drive him so crazy he'd say, "All right, come in or else go away," and it was usually something unimportant.
He liked Wiesner, though, I think.
Oh, yes.
On this—when it came to appointing ambassadors, there was always the—the State Department always wanted to appoint a Foreign Service officer, and the White House people always wanted to send some non–Foreign Service officer—someone like Bill Attwood, or someone like that. Did he ever comment on that general problem?
Well, just as I said, that the Foreign Service ambassadors were usually so awful. And, you know, sometimes you obviously had to send one. You couldn't demoralize the State Department so completely. Then he went over there to give a talk to them once and to tell them—and he really prepared that talk. He said, it's so awful in the State Department. They get so demoralized. They get sort of trained not to take a position one way or the other, but by the time they get way up—and he said younger people should get up quicker—they just can't give you any answer but the answer that's no answer—safe on both sides. And so the whole point of the speech that he gave to them was that you must, you know, be prepared to take an answer one way or the other, and you must be prepared to go to Congress, or—I don't know. Just that their training was wrong, and they were brainwashed by the time they got there, and, mostly too effete to do any good, which was sort of the standard the people at the State Department admired. And just to say something rather interesting and unfair about someone who was a friend, which Jack never said to me but I saw this later, this winter when he came to see me—it's Chip Bohlen. He loved Chip Bohlen, and when Chip Bohlen was around. And sometimes I used to tease Chip Bohlen, and say that he was too stuffy or State Department–ish. I used to just see this side in little things. But he was appointed ambassador to Paris just about the time of the missile crisis—
That's right.
And Bobby asked him to stay, and I think Jack asked him, but sort of vaguely, but Chip Bohlen couldn't wait to get on that boat.42 And I said to him this winter—he came to see me in this house—something about it or "Why weren't you there?" And Bobby told me the reason he wanted Chip Bohlen to stay so much was that he'd been their Russian adviser for so long and Llewellyn Thompson had just sort of come in and they didn't really know Thompson that well. So here they were, entering this crisis with a new Russian expert. But Bohlen had to take the boat—he wasn't even going to take a plane. And so I said to Bohlen, "Aren't you sad?" or "You missed it," or "Why did you go?" And he said, "Oh, well, I didn't think it was very important. It didn't seem so bad." And then he said, "I thought I could perhaps do more good over there, from that side." Which was so much baloney because he just barely got there. And he said, "Was it really all that serious? It didn't seem that to me." And I thought, "My Lord, the greatest, most awful thing that's happened in your lifetime—and all you can say was that it was not that serious?" And the thing is that even Chip Bohlen was so imbued—who is a brilliant man—by that State Department thinking, that the one thing that mattered to him most—he'd finally been made ambassador to Paris, where, he said, he hoped and assumed he would stay, he told me—this is under Johnson. But once that happened, he didn't care what was happening, he was going to get there. I just think that's sad. Though I love Bohlen, it makes me think so much less of him.
I know. It's very puzzling. I did an oral history thing with him, and he went through all this, and I asked him and got the same unconvincing—and he said, "Well, everything was set up, and if I went to Paris, I could explain what our policy was." And it was not convincing. But then he loved the President and said one marvelous thing about him. He said—I mean, thi
s is on the tape—that he said if—"When the President was killed and Johnson came in, I felt this was the future giving way to the present or the past."
Oh, then another thing that disappointed me about him—he named—he was there at the ceremonies where they named a street after Jack in Paris and he sent me his speech. Well, one line of it was, though there was "a certain sadness about this day," the naming of this street shows that Franco-American relations—is a great step forward for Franco-American relations, or something. Well, I just thought, this day "une certaine tristesse" was the words. I wanted to write him back—but the poor man sent me the speech, so, of course, he was trying to do his best—and say, "Is that all you think of this day? A certain sadness? You sound like Hervé with your Franco-American relations'!" So, Bohlen had so much but he didn't—I don't know, a little extra thing.
He's the best of the Foreign Service officers, but even he has been deformed in some way by that—
And, for instance, if he, who's brilliant, could have been made secretary of state, it wouldn't have done any good because he would protect his own, and that was just what Jack wanted to get out of there—the people who would protect their own.
On the domestic side, economic policy and so on, Walter Heller.43
I don't really know what he thought about what Walter Heller did or everything. He didn't have the same personality as Walter Heller, so whereas Galbraith and everyone you would have home or for dinner, we never saw Walter Heller. I think he thought he leaked a lot of things—didn't he?
Yeah, I think he did.
Or that he was talking to the press, or something. I mean, I never heard him say anything against Walter Heller. I always thought Walter Heller was sort of a—well, a jerk when you meet him. I never could believe he was such a brilliant economist.
He did a good job, I think—
But—
And has been very unhappy—since.
So, I never heard him—but I mean, we didn't—Jack and I didn't really talk economics, so—I guess he thought he was fine.
On the Supreme Court, the President—
Oh, he loved Douglas Dillon.
Yeah.
But—and he thought a lot of Dave Bell.
Yes, he relied heavily on—did he?—on Dave Bell. When Kermit Gordon became director of the budget, did—was there any particular reaction?44
Well, that's because he wanted what? Dave Bell—
Dave went over to AID.
AID, yeah.
Yeah, but Gordon didn't—
I don't know anything about that. Wasn't he sad that Dave Bell had to leave being director of the budget? Yeah, he was really sad about that.
He felt Dave was the only man who could straighten out the AID situation.45 You remember Fowler Hamilton46 had—
Oh, that's right. And he was very sad, the way it came out about Fowler Hamilton. I can't remember exactly but it looked as if he—oh, no, no. Labouisse.47
Labouisse.
Labouisse. It looked as if he'd been fired for incompetency or something, and he—Jack so badly wanted to have it come that he was being promoted by being ambassador to Greece. However, that story came out, he was sorry for Labouisse—he was sad. It shows a certain charity again.
The President made two appointments to the Supreme Court, you remember. Byron White48 and Arthur Goldberg. Did he talk much about the Court or about—
Well, I remember he was really happy that he'd have two appointments to make and I think he thought both his appointments were good.
Yes.
And I know that Justice Frankfurter, he knew wanted him to appoint whoever it was—Paul someone?
Paul Freund.49
Yeah. And he knew of that wish. He was—he went to call on Frankfurter a couple of times and again once—brought him to his office. But he wanted to put Goldberg in there.
He used to be—he and Bill Douglas used to be—at least, Bill Douglas—was a great friend of Mr. Kennedy.50
Of his father's, and then really of Bobby's. They were always going off all through Russia and everything together. We never really saw Bill Douglas much, but I think he liked him.
He wasn't around the White House much.
No, never.
Never.
But none of those people were. Arthur Goldberg used to be around our house in Georgetown a lot for the time of the labor bill, but that was always for breakfast. And Arthur Goldberg—I said to Jack once—some dinner where I sat next to him—"He is the biggest egomaniac of any man I've ever seen in my life." And it's true. I've never seen a man who never stops talking about himself.
Yeah, he does it with sort of an innocent, joyous way, but it is hard.
Well, I find that horrifying. I'm not sure Jack didn't make a mistake putting him on the Supreme Court because that just seems to make people think they're more and more special.
And as they're out of the newspapers, they feel they have to make up for that by talking more about—
And the decision that I thought this winter—you know, that was made after Jack's death, this case where it's all right to print anything, even libel, about someone in the press. It's a little more complicated than that, but you remember.
The New York Times case.
Yes. But that seemed such an awful thing to do—and Goldberg was the one who held out and said that it could even be malicious and completely untrue. And I thought, that's right after that ad of the day in Dallas, of the picture of Jack—"Wanted for Treason." And there you, his appointee, go and say that everything, even this, is all right? But it's because the Supreme Court is so isolated. They're never affected by newspapers, anything. So Arthur Goldberg's head's going to be even more swelled in a few more years. So, I guess, Jack always said he was the most brilliant labor lawyer that ever was.
What about the President and the press—apart from Charlie Bartlett and Ben Bradlee, who were—
I suppose so many of our friends before the White House were in the press. I mean, there's Rowlie Evans, Hugh Sidey—Bill Lawrence he played golf with.51 You know, he basically liked them. I always thought in Washington, politics and the press—you're both sort of involved in doing something. So many of his friends were there. Bill Kent in Florida would be around, sometimes. He liked the kind of badinage and everything you could have with them. Much more than his colleagues in Congress, though we had some there. And then—people always used to say that he was so thin-skinned by the press, but that really wasn't true. And it was so funny, because one night Ben Bradlee was taunting him—or, no, he was saying to Ben Bradlee something that was written was untrue. And Ben Bradlee came one night for dinner in an absolute rage because some tiny little Republican newsletter that his John Birch mother-in-law subscribed to had had a paragraph written by—not Tony Lewis but Tony someone who wrote for Nixon—
Ralph de Toledano.52
Ralph de Toledano had written something bad about Ben Bradlee. You would have thought it had been over the front page of the New York Times. Just one or two sentences, and Ben was in a rage. And Jack just sort of lean—I mean he didn't really rub it in, he just leaned back and looked amused and said, "Well, see how you fellows feel when something unfair is written." I guess the one thing he admitted was a mistake was canceling the Herald Tribune.53 He was a little bit more that way in the beginning, but at the end he'd never mention unfavorable things, or if I'd say, "Oh, I think so-and-so is so awful"—when I'd come home to him and he'd say, "Don't think about it. Don't read those things." You know, he just accepted it as part of the—you know, when there was something good, I mean, he wouldn't mention it. I'd say, "Wasn't it wonderful what"—I don't know—"someone said today?" If I could find it.
What about the great statesmen of the press, like Lippmann and Scotty and all the rest of them—and Joe Alsop?
Well, Joe was his friend. And, I think, Lippmann and Reston—Reston was awfully sanctimonious and sort of—so they were never close. I mean, I'm sure Jack saw them in his office and things.
And, of course, they had this kind of jealousy or resentment of Jack because for the first time there was a president who probably was brighter than they were, who was younger, who was—Lippmann had two things against Jack, partly his father and partly being Catholic, strangely enough. And you hear this in conversations with other people but he could never sort of purge from this—
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