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

by Caroline Kennedy

  73. ELIZABETH VIRGINIA BEALE (1911–2006) was an extroverted and widely read Washington social columnist.

  74. ELIZABETH GUEST CONDON (1937– ) was later married to the film director George Stevens, Jr.

  75. NINA GORE AUCHINCLOSS STEERS (1937– ) was Jacqueline's stepsister.

  76. LORRAINE WAXMAN PEARCE (1934– ), the first White House curator, was an alumna of the Winterthur graduate program and a specialist in the French impact on decorative arts in America. Although she found Pearce "as excited as a hunting dog," Mrs. Kennedy was displeased by what she saw as Pearce's desire for the limelight. For her part, with no political experience, the young Pearce felt baffled by the complex interplay among the First Lady, her Fine Arts Committee, the White House Historical Association, du Pont, and Boudin. After a year, Jacqueline had her reassigned to oversee the new White House guidebook. In September 1962, the First Lady wrote du Pont, "Why are some people so avid for publicity—when it poisons everything. I hate & mistrust it & no one who has ever worked for me who liked it has been trustworthy."

  77. WILLIAM VOSS ELDER III (1933– ) succeeded Mrs. Pearce as curator.

  78. ANDRé MEYER (1898–1979) was a French Jewish refugee who headed American operations for the Paris investment bank Lazard Frères. He first met the First Lady when he contributed the Aubusson rug for the French Empire–inspired Red Room. After President Kennedy's death, Meyer became one of Jacqueline's closest friends.

  79. PIERRE MENDèS FRANCE (1907–1982) was French president from 1954 to 1955.

  THE FIFTH CONVERSATION

  1. FIDEL CASTRO RUZ (1926– ) and his guerrilla army entered Havana in triumph in January 1959, having overthrown the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. That April, he visited Washington, D.C., at the invitation of the National Press Club and was refused an audience by President Eisenhower. The following year, Castro began importing Soviet oil and expropriating American firms.

  2. EARL E. T. SMITH (1903–1991), a Newport-born sportsman and financier, of New York and Palm Beach, was ambassador to Havana from 1957 to 1959. His wife, Florence Pritchett Smith (1920–1965), had been a friend of President Kennedy's since school days.

  3. HERBERT MATTHEWS (1900–1977) was a New York Times correspondent in Cuba whose reports were criticized for being too pro-Castro.

  4. NORMAN MAILER (1923–2007) was a novelist and essayist best known for The Naked and the Dead (1948). Mailer wrote the laudatory "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" in Esquire about JFK's victory at the 1960 convention, but the following spring, after the Bay of Pigs, he denounced the President for sponsoring the invasion and declared Castro one of his "heroes."

  5. Smith's 1962 book The Fourth Floor lambasted Assistant Secretary of State Roy Rubottom and other Eisenhower officials for being too relaxed about letting Castro seize power in Cuba.

  6. ALLEN DULLES (1893–1969) was a Wall Street lawyer and brother of Eisenhower's secretary of state who served as director of Central Intelligence from 1953 to 1961. Along with J. Edgar Hoover, he was JFK's first reappointment as President-elect—and, like Hoover, in the name of continuity. On July 23, 1960, Dulles came to Hyannis Port to brief the newly minted Democratic nominee on national security.

  7. In his 1962 memoir Six Crises, former Vice President Nixon insisted that during the July briefing, Dulles told Kennedy that for months, the CIA had "not only been supporting and assisting, but actually training Cuban exiles for the purpose of supporting an invasion of Cuba itself." Nixon complained that JFK had abused this access to classified information in October 1960 to criticize Eisenhower's government for failing to help "fighters for freedom" eager to overthrow Castro. In Nixon's telling, in order to preserve the operation's secrecy, he felt compelled during the debates with Kennedy to argue the other side, although in secret he had actually been a champion of CIA plans to upend Castro.

  8. Referring to the attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 by anti-Castro Cubans, backed by the CIA. The Agency had given Kennedy to believe that if the exiles, after landing, managed to establish a beachhead in Cuba, public dissatisfaction with Castro might generate a national uprising that would topple the dictator and put the exiles in power—and that if they failed, they could "melt into the mountains" of Cuba as guerrillas. None of these assurances proved accurate, which inflicted a severe blow to Kennedy's prestige. JFK's circle blamed the CIA for its faulty intelligence and planning. The CIA and its partisans blamed Kennedy for refusing to suspend his order that U.S. military forces stay out of the battle.

  9. In September 1962, Senator Kenneth Keating, New York Republican, charged that the Soviets had placed offensive missiles in Cuba and that the Kennedy administration was trying to conceal their presence. This was weeks before the CIA provided President Kennedy with the first hard evidence, gathered from U-2 photographs, of the missiles on the island.

  10. By that Sunday afternoon, April 16, 1961, six American B-26s painted with Cuban insignia had already destroyed almost half of Castro's air force. CIA officials had presumed that, once the invasion was under way, JFK would be willing to discard his public pledge not to invade Cuba and authorize U.S. military forces to openly support the freedom-fighters then landing on Cuban beaches. Rusk's call warned the President of the importance of concealing any American role in the invasion. Kennedy thus witheld U.S. air power until the exiles were established on Cuba, at which time such a strike might be plausibly explained as coming from Cuban soil. At that moment, a ban on American air strikes was likely to doom the invasion, and Kennedy knew it.

  11. LYMAN LEMNITZER (1899–1988) had been appointed by Eisenhower in 1960 as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In March 1962, Lemnitzer approved a highly classified plan, called Operation Northwoods, for the U.S. government to commit acts of terrorism in Miami and other American cities and blame them on Castro as a pretext for a full American invasion of Cuba. The plan even had suggested that if a U.S. astronaut perished during a mission, the finger should be pointed at Castro. Appalled by Lemnitzer's proposal and still fuming over the general's ham-handed advice during the Bay of Pigs, JFK denied him a second term that fall as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

  12. JOSE MIRO CARDONA (1902–1974) was a Havana lawyer, professor, and prominent Batista critic who, after the revolution, was briefly Castro's prime minister before he broke with him and fled to Florida. Before the Bay of Pigs, Cardona was leader of the committee of anti-Castro Cubans who were quietly cooperating with the CIA and the tiny group of Kennedy officials involved in the forthcoming invasion. Had the Cuban exiles managed to seize a substantial portion of their island, they would have declared Cardona provisional president of Cuba.

  13. ADOLF BERLE (1895–1971) was a law professor, economic theorist, and FDR-era diplomat who was assisting the State Department on Latin America.

  14. On Tuesday evening, April 18, JFK was summoned from the annual White House reception for Congress to the Cabinet Room, where a Caribbean map with tiny magnetic ships had been set up. Kennedy told Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of the U.S. Navy, "I don't want the United States involved in this." Burke replied, "Hell, Mr. President, we are involved!" As a compromise, the President allowed six jets from the U.S.S. Essex to fly over the invasion beachhead for an hour.

  15. MARK SHAW (1921–1969) was one of the most well-known fashion and celebrity photographers of the time.

  16. CONSTANTINE KARAMANLIS (1907–1998) was prime minister of Greece. By Wednesday evening, when the Kennedys attended a Greek embassy dinner hosted by Karamanlis, the President knew that the invasion was an inescapable failure.

  17. JOHN MCCONE (1902–1991) was a California businessman, chairman of Eisenhower's Atomic Energy Commission, and Nixon supporter in 1960, whom JFK appointed to succeed Allen Dulles, after firing the latter in the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster.

  18. At an April 21, 1961, press conference, the President said, "There's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan." JFK accepted full responsib
ility for the failure as "the responsible officer of the government." Americans rallied to him and gave him the highest Gallup Poll approval ratings of his presidency—81 percent.

  19. CURTIS LEMAY (1906–1990) was the truculent Air Force chief of staff, known for his leadership of World War II strategic bombing and the postwar Strategic Air Command. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, LeMay became the fiercest of those demanding that JFK start bombing Cuba immediately.

  20. Since the sunburst of recovery programs created by FDR to fight the Great Depression during the first hundred days of his presidency, this metric has been used by the press ever since to issue wildly premature assessments of new presidents.

  21. CHARLES WRIGHTSMAN (1895–1986) was an Oklahoma oil tycoon and social friend of the Kennedys, along with his wife, Jayne Larkin Wrightsman (1919– ), who was a close friend to Jacqueline and who served on her Fine Arts Committee to supervise and raise funds for the White House restoration.

  22. JóZSEF CARDINAL MINDSZENTY (1892–1975) of Budapest was sentenced, after a 1949 show trial, to life imprisonment for "treason" against the Soviet-dominated government of Hungary.

  23. As legend had it, when asked by a friend for a loan, one of the banking Rothschilds replied that he would do better: he would escort the friend through the Paris bourse and thereby elevate the friend's standing among financiers. JFK had long enjoyed this concept. After the 1960 election, for example, the President-elect told his campaign adviser Hyman Raskin of Chicago that he would give him a better thank-you gift than a federal job: he would call Raskin to his Georgetown house for counsel.

  24. As a retired general, Taylor wore civilian attire.

  25. JAMES GAVIN (1907–1990), fabled commander of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment on D-day, was JFK's first ambassador to Paris. Like Maxwell Taylor, General Gavin had quit Eisenhower's Pentagon over defense strategy and published a book (War and Peace in the Space Age) explaining why.

  26. It was after the Bay of Pigs that JFK convinced his brother to expand his portfolio and become his confidential adviser and troubleshooter on foreign, defense, and intelligence policy—especially toward Cuba and the Soviet Union.

  27. President Kennedy asked Taylor to head a committee to conduct a postmortem on the Bay of Pigs failure. Other panel members were Robert Kennedy, Allen Dulles, and Admiral Arleigh Burke.

  28. JFK felt responsible for the almost 1,200 invaders captured by Castro. The evidence was his willingness to brave domestic political criticism by encouraging a public campaign, including a "Tractors for Freedom" committee, headed by eminent Americans, to meet Castro's ransom demands for about $60 million worth of tractors, drugs, baby food, and medical equipment in exchange for their freedom. In December 1962, the Kennedys welcomed the liberated Cubans at a raucous rally in Miami's Orange Bowl, where Jacqueline told the ex-prisoners in Spanish that she hoped John would grow up to be as brave as they were.

  29. OLEG PENKOVSKY (1919–1963) was a valuable secret agent for Western intelligence in Moscow when he was exposed, arrested, tried, and executed.

  30. Tractors for Freedom Committee.

  31. To avoid disrupting the Joseph Kennedy household in Palm Beach, the President and First Lady leased the neighboring home of Mr. and Mrs. C. Michael Paul.

  32. ERNEIDO OLIVA GONZALEZ (1932– ) was deputy commander of invasion Brigade 2506 and had just been released from Castro's prison. The following year, he and some of his comrades received U.S. Army commissions.

  33. XAVIER CUGAT (1900–1990) was a popular Spanish-born bandleader who had spent his childhood in Cuba.

  34. A large reason that Oliva and his comrades were so disillusioned was that President Johnson had just shut down the considerable program of covert action against Cuba that had been quietly supervised by the Kennedy brothers.

  35. In the Orange Bowl, with the freed Cubans shouting "Guerra! Guerra! Guerra!," JFK, much affected by the scene, accepted Brigade 2506's flag and pledged to return it "in a free Havana."

  36. DONALD BARNES (1930–2003) was the government's senior Spanish interpreter, and was duly interviewed for the Kennedy Library's oral history program.

  37. CHARLES SEDGWICK (1912–1983).

  38. Raids from the sea were part of the U.S. covert action waged against Castro's Cuba.

  39. JEAN DANIEL (1920– ) was editor of the French socialist journal L'Observateur. In October 1963, he was scheduled to interview Castro. Before his departure for Havana, his friend Ben Bradlee arranged for him to see President Kennedy in the Oval Office. Daniel lunched with Castro on November 22, 1963, and they learned together of the President's assassination, which Castro pronounced "bad news." In the December 14, 1963, New Republic, Daniel wrote that during his conversation with JFK, the President had been surprisingly outspoken in accepting American responsibility for the seizure of Cuba by Castro and the excesses that followed, telling Daniel that "to some extent," Batista had been the "incarnation" of American "sins" against Cuba, and that "now we shall have to pay for those sins."

  40. EVELYN NORTON LINCOLN (1909–1995) was JFK's personal secretary from 1953 until his death.

  41. Miro Cardona had been angry that after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy administration seemed less aggressive about trying to overthrow Castro.

  42. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress was designed to increase economic cooperation with Latin American countries and position the United States as the friend and champion of reform, not dictatorship.

  43. In December 1961, the Kennedys went to Venezuela and Colombia.

  44. In June 1962, they visited Mexico City, riding through ebullient crowds, as guests of President Adolfo López Mateos (1909–1969), president of Mexico from 1958 to 1964, whom both Kennedys liked and admired for his social reforms.

  45. She refers to their arrival for JFK's meeting with Khrushchev in June 1961.

  46. HAROLD MACMILLAN (1894–1986), the Conservative British prime minister from 1957 to 1963, made his visit to Kennedy in April 1961. Soon he was JFK's closest friend among foreign leaders. They were related through the marriage of Kennedy's late sister Kathleen (1920–1948), known as "Kick," to William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, nephew of Macmillan's wife, Lady Dorothy. Hartington had died in World War II. Alberto Lleras Camargo (1906–1990) was a former journalist and the Colombian president from 1958 to 1962. During the Kennedys' visit to Bogotá in 1961, Camargo had given Mrs. Kennedy a tour of his presidential palace, a glittering museum of Colombian history, which she later considered to be an inspiration for her restoration of the White House.

  47. RóMULO BETANCOURT (1908–1981), Venezuelan president from 1945 to 1948 and 1959 to 1964, known as the "father of Venezuelan democracy."

  48. In 1961, Kennedy resisted pressures to deploy the U.S. military against pro-Communist forces in Laos. Instead he authorized negotiation, which resulted, the following year, in the country's neutrality.

  49. At the end of World War II, when the Allies drew up plans for postwar Germany, they left Berlin deep within the Soviet zone of occupation. The city itself was effectively divided into two sectors—East Berlin for the Soviets, West Berlin for the Americans, British, and French. By the late 1950s, Soviet-backed East Germany was an economic ruin, in contrast to the "miracle" of West Germany. Vast numbers of East Germans were escaping to the West through Berlin. To stop this refugee flow and score points against the Free World, Khrushchev demanded that the city be unified, which, because of its geographical position, would make it subject to Soviet whims and effectively force the West out of the German capital. The Western allies had committed themselves to preserve their rights in Berlin, if necessary, by going to war. When Kennedy left Khrushchev after their harsh Vienna encounter in June 1961, the Berlin Crisis was on, with the President calling up American reservists. Then suddenly in August, the Soviets and East Germans built a hideous wall around West Berlin to stop the "brain drain" to the West. Although Kennedy opposed the wall politically, he privately realized that the Sovi
et leader was providing himself a face-saving means to wind down the Berlin Crisis. The President told aides, "A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war."

  50. NGO DINH DIEM (1901–1963) was president of South Vietnam from the French withdrawal in 1955 until his death in a military coup. Jacqueline refers to protests like that of the Buddhist priest who burned himself to death in Saigon in the summer of 1963 to protest Diem's repressive policies.

  51. Both Kennedys were engaged by the literary quality and humor of the cables from JFK's ambassador to India.

  52. During times of stress, Jacqueline would cheer the President up by leaving him hand-drawn cartoons and limericks, bringing the children to his office, and having him served some of his most preferred foods, such as from Joe's Stone Crab from Miami. In private, she also performed uncanny impersonations of some of the people with whom JFK had to deal. She could imitate the French ambassador doing his own impersonation of de Gaulle.

  53. WILLIAM WALTON (1910–1994), journalist, novelist, painter, and soldier, had been dropped into France at the start of the D-day invasion. A close friend of both Kennedys (he hung paintings in JFK's Oval Office after the inauguration), Walton accepted Jackie's appeal to serve as chair of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which oversaw the aesthetic design of federal buildings and monuments. "It is all going to be involved with all the things we care about," she wrote him in June 1962. "Lovely buildings will be torn down—and cheesy skyscrapers go up. Perhaps saving old buildings and having the new ones be right isn't the most important thing in the world—if you are waiting for the bomb—but I think we are always going to be waiting for the bomb and it won't ever come and so to save the old—and to make the new beautiful is terribly important.''