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

by Caroline Kennedy

  14. One of the presidential yachts, which JFK had renamed for his grandfather.

  15. Gielgud's recitings from Shakespeare (1958).

  16. JULES DAVIDS (1920–1996), a gentle Georgetown University diplomatic historian who at the time was little known or published, performed research on five chapters of Profiles in Courage. His wife later noted that his honorarium of $700 was "a lot of money for us in those days."

  17. The Whig party of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries epitomized the British style of wealthy aristocrats standing for political office. The Whigs resisted a strong monarchy, just as their nineteenth-century American namesake party opposed powerful presidents such as their hated Andrew Jackson. Asked by James MacGregor Burns in 1959 about presidential power, JFK insisted, "I am no Whig!"

  18. In Churchill's four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. She means the English civil war of 1692–1696.

  19. DANIEL WEBSTER (1782–1852), senator from Massachusetts, had his own chapter in Profiles in Courage for supporting the Compromise of 1850.

  20. In 1970, Jacqueline wrote about her husband to Ted Kennedy, "He was the only president after Jefferson, to care about gardens—(A letter that came up at Parke-Bernet the fall of 1963, which he thought was too expensive to buy, I was going to try and give him for his birthday—Jefferson writes to France—for 4 gardeners—they would also play chamber music at Monticello in the evenings.) Like Jefferson, he cared about architecture—or rather the harmony of man in his environment."

  21. ALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH (1884–1980), herself a landmark of Washington social life for most of the twentieth century, was Theodore Roosevelt's daughter by his first wife. Busch's book was T.R.: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt and His Influence on Our Times (1963).

  22. This was in the 1930s, while Joseph Kennedy served FDR as chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission and ambassador to the Court of St. James's.

  23. JFK's private coolness toward Franklin Roosevelt was almost unique among Democratic leaders of the 1960s, who usually regarded him as a household saint. It reflected Joseph Kennedy's painful break with FDR in 1941 over intervention in Europe, JFK's lingering resentment over Eleanor Roosevelt's hostility toward him before the 1960 Democratic convention, and his own lifelong aversion to almost all hero worship. Like many others, JFK was critical of what he considered to be FDR's overtolerance of Soviet military power in Europe at the end of World War II, leaving the West at a military disadvantage in Berlin and the rest of Europe, which proved to be one of Kennedy's biggest troubles as President. Still JFK was not unwilling to recognize Roosevelt's qualities of greatness, especially in domestic affairs. In the Republican household of her early upbringing, Jacqueline's father used to jocularly quote from Peter Arno's famous New Yorker cartoon, "Let's go down to the Trans-Lux and hiss Roosevelt!"

  24. Criticized for speaking too rarely to the American people on television, Kennedy was urged to follow the example of FDR's radio "fireside chats." He asked Schlesinger to find out exactly how many such chats Roosevelt had during twelve years as president to counter the popular impression that they were almost weekly. By contrast, President Kennedy had a press conference roughly every two weeks.

  25. ROSE ELIZABETH FITZGERALD KENNEDY (1890–1995) was the President's mother, whom Jacqueline called "Belle Mère." At this point, she had an affectionate but somewhat distant relationship with her mother-in-law, especially in comparison to the instant connection she had felt on first meeting Joseph Kennedy. After the President's death, Rose and Jacqueline became closer.

  26. Both Kennedys had resented the closing passage of Burns's 1960 book John Kennedy: A Political Profile, written with JFK's cooperation, which, while praising the Senator's talent and energy, questioned his emotional commitment to political goals. (In the final sentence of his book, Burns wrote that for Kennedy to bring "passion" to the presidency "would depend on his making a commitment not only of mind, but of heart, that until now he has never been required to make.") Jacqueline so vehemently objected to this that she wrote Burns a crisp rebuttal in longhand: "I think you underestimate him. Anyone sees he has the intelligence—magnetism and drive it takes to succeed in politics. I see, every succeeding week I am married to him, that he has what may be the single most important quality for a leader—an imperturbable self-confidence and sureness of his powers. . . . When you have someone like Jack, why write him off as a pathetic little string bean, groping and searching and somehow finding himself near the top, blinking in the sunlight?"

  27. CHARLES-ANDRE-MARIE DE GAULLE (1890–1970), the Free French leader of World War II, served as French president from 1959 to 1969. In the mid-1950s, Jacqueline named her French poodle "de Gaulle." As an ardent Francophile in art, architecture, literature, history, and couture, she was all the more vexed, as the Kennedy years unfolded, by de Gaulle's willingness to poison his relations with JFK and the United States, as well as the rest of the Western alliance, by upholding his extreme standard of French pride and independence.

  28. Announcing his presidential candidacy on January 2, 1960, JFK said, "I have developed an image of America as fulfilling a noble and historic role as the defender of freedom in a time of maximum peril. . . ."

  29. In 1886, when Lord Randolph Churchill resigned as chancellor of the Exchequer, he presumed himself indispensable and was startled when Lord Salisbury quickly appointed George Goschen to succeed him, prompting Churchill to lament that he had "forgot Goschen." The more recent example she is thinking of was probably Peter Thorneycroft, who resigned in 1958 as chancellor of the Exchequer, along with two lesser officials, to protest increased public spending. Dismissing the resignations as "little local difficulties," Prime Minister Harold Macmillan quickly replaced them all.

  30. JFK hoped that his victory in heavily Protestant West Virginia would quash the Catholic issue for good, but it remained virulent enough that in September 1960, he felt compelled to appear before a group of Protestant ministers in Houston and reaffirm his strong support for separation of church from state, saying, "I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic party's candidate, who happens also to be a Catholic." Kennedy's youth was another obstacle: at 43, he would be the youngest man ever elected President.

  31. In the most acute eruption of the youth issue all year, on July 2, 1960, appearing at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, former President Truman asked JFK, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, to step aside on grounds that he was too young and inexperienced, and that the convention had been "rigged" in advance. Two days later, at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York, the candidate replied by saying that if "fourteen years in office is insufficient experience" (referring to his tenure in Congress but not his wartime naval years, which he elsewhere included in what he called his eighteen years of "service to the United States") that would rule out every twentieth-century president, including Truman himself. After making this statement, he flew to Los Angeles for his party's convention.

  32. One of LBJ's favorite sayings. To Johnson, a reliable friend was someone "you would go to the well with" in order to draw water, referring to the days when American Indians threatened settlers of European origin.

  33. CAROLINE LEE BOUVIER CANFIELD RADZIWILL (1933– ) was Jacqueline's younger sister.

  34. Referring to Ted Sorensen.

  35. DREW PEARSON (1897–1969) was the foremost muckraking journalist of the day, with a widely syndicated column and weekly television program on ABC. Clark Clifford (1906–1998) was a St. Louis lawyer who was counsel and close adviser to President Harry Truman before starting a lucrative Washington law practice and earning a reputation as one of the "wise men" of Washington. During the 1950s, JFK was one of his clients. In 1957, Pearson charged on ABC that Profiles in Courage had actually been written by Sorensen. With Clifford's help, JFK forced Pearson to retract the allegation. During the 1960 campaign, Kennedy asked Clifford to start preparing for a potential transition to the White House. Thro
ugh JFK's presidency, Clifford continued to advise both Kennedys on various matters private and public.

  36. At this moment, Schlesinger was not averse to provoking Mrs. Kennedy against Sorensen. At the time of these oral history interviews, both men were rushing to complete rival books on President Kennedy, which for a time frayed their relations. In his 2007 autobiography (Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History), Sorensen notes Pearson's charge "that I had privately boasted or indirectly hinted that I had written much of the book (a charge that, I regret to say, may have been—it was all too long ago to remember—partly true)." He insists that "like JFK's speeches, Profiles in Courage was a collaboration, and not a particularly unusual one, inasmuch as our method of collaboration on the book was similar to the method we used in our speeches." Sorensen writes that in 1953, he and JFK agreed that on any outside published work on which they collaborated, Sorensen would receive at least half the fees or royalties. He adds that when Profiles became a major bestseller, generating royalties "far in excess of anything either of us had ever contemplated," JFK "unexpectedly and generously" gave him "a sum to be spread over several years, that I regarded as more than fair," and which, by 1961, still exceeded half the book's earnings. Despite her tart comments about Sorensen during these interviews, Jacqueline soon mended her differences with him and later, during her New York years, their friendship resumed.

  37. RFK had served as assistant counsel of Senator Joseph McCarthy's Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations before finally resigning in protest over McCarthy's excesses. From 1957 to 1959, he served as chief counsel for Senator John McClellan's committee on labor racketeering, a perch from which he relentlessly pursued Teamsters president James Hoffa.

  38. EDWARD MOORE KENNEDY (1932–2009) was the ninth Kennedy child. After Teddy's birth, Jack asked his parents, "Can I be godfather to the baby?" They agreed. Ted Kennedy was the campaign manager of record when JFK ran for a second term in the Senate, but as he was studying at the University of Virginia law school, he was not involved full-time. In 1962, Ted won his brother's old Senate seat and occupied it until his death.

  39. ARTHUR GOLDBERG (1908–1990) of Chicago, son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Ukraine, was general counsel to the AFL-CIO and United Steelworkers before JFK appointed him as labor secretary and then, in September 1962, to the Supreme Court.

  40. GEORGE MEANY (1894–1980), a rough-hewn former Bronx plumber, was chief of the AFL-CIO.

  41. SEYMOUR HARRIS (1897–1974) was a Harvard economist.

  42. The Landrum-Griffin labor reform act of 1959 sought to regulate union practices to avoid the excesses that the Kennedy brothers had uncovered in their hearings. JFK wished to ensure that it did not also restrict honest union activity.

  43. In 1957, the French were waging war against Algerians who wished to liberate their country from being a part of "metropolitan France." JFK gave a controversial speech denouncing French dominion over Algeria, taking the then-bold (and farsighted) view that it was in the American interest to side with anticolonial movements, both because it was right and because it would help the United States attract newly independent nations in which such movements had succeeded.

  44. From 1951 to 1953, she was the "Inquiring Photographer" for the Washington Times-Herald, whose editor, Frank Waldrop, noted that Jackie "could see around corners." In that role, she covered the coronation of Elizabeth II.

  45. In 1954, the French withdrew from Vietnam after an embarrassing defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and the United States was under severe pressure to replace them and pick up the struggle to keep the North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), from seizing the entire country. JFK was skeptical and wished to learn more. With her excellent command of French, Jacqueline translated books for him on the history and politics of French colonies in North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia and other subjects.

  46. Georges d'Argenlieu was French colonial administrator in Indochina from 1945 to 1947. The Ammonites were Biblical seminomadic descendants of Lot. Swiss Mennonites emigrated to Algeria in the nineteenth century.

  47. By voting for construction of the seaway, which would expand U.S. commerce at the expense of jobs in Massachusetts, Kennedy outraged many of his constituents, who complained that he was more concerned about the rest of the country than his own state.

  48. During their first debate in September 1960, JFK rebutted Nixon's charge that he was "too extreme" by complaining that Republicans were opposing an increase in the federal hourly minimum wage, then a dollar, to $1.25: "I don't think that's extreme at all."

  49. Kennedy's meeting with Eisenhower was actually in April 1961, after the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion.

  50. This refers to the effort to build a National Cultural Center in Washington (later renamed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), finally opened in 1971.

  51. CLEM NORTON (1894–1979) was a crony of JFK's Fitzgerald grandfather who comes to life in Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah as Charlie Hennessey, "a sallow, happy tub of a man in his fifties with bulging excited eyes." Norton had been superintendent of Commonwealth Pier and, campaigning from his own one-man sound truck, a perennial loser for mayor of Boston.

  52. In June 1963, during a trip to Europe, JFK viewed the Berlin Wall and then gave a rousing speech (in what is now John F. Kennedy Platz) assuring free West Berliners that he would support them against Soviet threats to drive them from the city. When he spoke the words "Ich bin ein Berliner!" there was such an ovation that he later joked that he would offer three words of advice to later presidents at a moment of discouragement: "Go to Germany."

  53. By contrast, Robert Kennedy was shocked in 1964 when LBJ told him that of all the things in life, he liked campaigning the best.

  THE THIRD CONVERSATION

  1. When JFK entered the Senate in 1953, his Republican colleague Joseph McCarthy was using the Senate's Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations to pursue supposed hidden Communists in the U.S. government, damaging innocent lives in the process. Caught between the many Massachusetts voters (especially Irish-Americans) who loved McCarthy and the liberal Democrats who abhorred him, Kennedy was criticized by some for failing to publicly denounce the Wisconsin demagogue. In December 1954, when the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, JFK was recovering from his near fatal back operation and was the only Democratic member not to participate.

  2. PAUL DOUGLAS (1892–1976) was a liberal Democratic senator from Illinois.

  3. JOHN FOX (1906–1985) bought the Boston Post in 1952 for $6 million (including a loan of $500,000 from Joseph Kennedy, for which Fox expressed his thanks by renouncing his endorsement of Henry Cabot Lodge in favor of JFK for the Senate). Fox made the paper shrill and McCarthyite, and deployed it in strong support of "Onions" Burke in the spring of 1956. Later that year it went bankrupt. Fox ultimately died penniless.

  4. In January 1953, Robert Kennedy started work for McCarthy's committee as an assistant counsel under McCarthy's abrasive and unscrupulous counsel, Roy Cohn. The animosity between the two men over matters great and small at one point almost led to a fistfight. By the summer, Robert had moved to the Democratic side of the committee staff, then quit altogether.

  5. HENRY "SCOOP" JACKSON (1912–1983) was a Democratic senator from Washington whom JFK seriously considered for vice president in 1960.

  6. MILES MCMILLIN (1923–1982) was a reporter and later publisher of the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin. His wife Elsie Rockefeller McMillin (1924–1982) had been married to the state's new senator, William Proxmire. JFK thought McMillin was anti-Catholic.

  7. In 1964, Mrs. Kennedy still thought of liberals as people who gave Jack trouble—as did, on occasion, her husband. Members of the group that JFK called "professional liberals" had mistrusted him since he first ran for the House in 1946 because of his conservative father. Once he was President, they charged that he was a militant Cold Warrior and too intimidated by conservative southern Democratic congressional committee chairmen to v
igorously pursue the liberal agenda on civil rights, education, labor, health, poverty, and other domestic issues.

  8. FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, JR. (1914–1988) served in Congress with JFK from 1949 to 1955. Kennedy especially valued his endorsement in 1960 because it offset the pre-convention opposition of his mother, Eleanor, who much preferred her close friend Stevenson. After failing to find him a suitable position in his government (he asked McNamara to appoint him secretary or assistant secretary of the navy, as his father had been under Wilson, but the new Pentagon chief refused), the President made him undersecretary of commerce in 1963.

  9. Campaigning for JFK in West Virginia, Roosevelt told reporters that Humphrey was "a good Democrat, but I don't know where he was in World War II." In fact, the Minnesotan had tried to enter the wartime military but was rejected because of a hernia.

  10. This melodrama was Private Property, by director Leslie Stevens, so low budget that it was filmed in Stevens's Hollywood Hills home, starring his wife, Kate Manx. It portrays a housewife taking up with hoodlums, with scenes of rape and murder. By Bradlee's recollection, JFK speculated (correctly) that Private Property was on the Catholic Church's index of prohibited films, and joked that it would have helped him with some of West Virginia's Catholic-hating voters, had they known he would be watching it.