54. KWAME NKRUMAH (1909–1972) became the first president of an independent Ghana in 1960. Soon Nkrumah was busy amassing a corrupt fortune, placing restrictions on his people's freedoms, and flirting with the Soviet Union.
55. HAILE SELASSIE (1892–1975) was the Ethiopian emperor, known as the "Lion of Judah," and by tradition descended from King Solomon.
56. SUKARNO (1901–1970), after leading Indonesia to independence from the Dutch, was its first president from 1945 to 1967 and widely known for both lust and corruption. He also, after a fashion, collected art.
57. ALBERTO VARGAS (1896–1982) was a Peruvian-born painter who created pinups of beautiful women, both nude and clothed, which appeared in Esquire and Playboy.
58. GEORGE PETTY (1894–1975) painted female subjects in poses similar to those of Vargas.
59. ALEKSEI ADZHUBEI (1924–1993) was Khrushchev's son-in-law and editor of Izvestia. JFK received him in November 1961 at Hyannis Port for an interview that was published in both of their countries.
60. Mrs. Kennedy presumably refers to the daughter-in-law who accompanied the Khrushchevs to Vienna.
61. RADA KHRUSHCHEVA ADZHUBEI (1929– ).
62. ANATOLY DOBRYNIN (1919–2010), a lifelong professional diplomat, came to Washington as Soviet ambassador in 1962.
63. Walton called on Soviet officials in Moscow on a trip arranged before the President's death to meet Soviet artists.
64. Social secretary Letitia Baldrige.
65. After the two leaders' first day of talks, the Kennedys and Khrushchevs were feted with a dinner and performance at Schönbrunn Palace.
66. Rose Kennedy, who came to Vienna.
67. In his memoirs, Khrushchev recalled, "Obviously she was quick of tongue or, as the Ukrainians say, she had a sharp tongue in her head. . . . Don't mix it up with her; she'll cut you down to size."
68. As Khrushchev loved to boast, the Soviet Union's space program in 1961 was ahead of America's.
69. ANDREI GROMYKO (1909–1989), the severe Soviet foreign minister, fouled his relationship with JFK in October 1962 by denying to his face in the Oval Office that the Soviets had placed missiles in Cuba.
70. This was in October 1961, during a conversation in the White House family quarters, in which JFK deflected Gromyko's bargaining attempts on West Berlin by saying, "You're offering to trade us an apple for an orchard. We don't do that in this country."
71. RACHEL "BUNNY" MELLON (1910–), a pharmaceuticals heiress and second wife of the philanthropist and arts patron Paul Mellon (1907–1999), was Jacqueline's close friend. Mellon served on her Fine Arts Committee and advised her on the restoration, the remaking of the White House gardens—she and JFK collaborated on the transformation of the Rose Garden into a tree-edged setting for outdoor ceremonies—and, ultimately, President Kennedy's Arlington gravesite.
72. The British prime minister made his first White House visit to Kennedy in April 1961.
73. DAVID ORMSBY-GORE (1918–1985) was British ambassador to Washington during the Kennedy years. A descendant of the Tory hero and British prime minister Lord Salisbury (1830–1903), he had known JFK since before World War II, when Joseph Kennedy served in prewar London. Ormsby-Gore was related by marriage to both Kennedy and Macmillan. As a Conservative member of Parliament, Ormsby-Gore had sporadically discussed disarmament with JFK throughout the 1950s. Both he and Macmillan pushed the President to fight hard for a comprehensive test ban treaty that would reduce the harshness of the Cold War arms race. (After his father's death in 1964, Ormsby-Gore became Lord Harlech.)
74. In October 1963, suffering from a prostate ailment, Macmillan resigned. His defense minister, John Profumo, had recently been embroiled in a sex and espionage scandal that tarnished the Macmillan government's reputation. Friends speculated that the ordeal might have led to Macmillan's malady, or that he was grateful to use the excuse of ill health to resign a job that had abruptly became unpleasant for him.
75. HUGH GAITSKELL (1906–1963) and Harold Wilson (1916–1995) were leaders of the Labour party opposition to Macmillan.
76. During Mrs. Kennedy's official visit to India, accompanied by her sister, in March 1962.
77. WARREN HASTINGS (1732–1818) was Britain's first governor-general of India. Charles James Fox (1749–1806) was a Whig political leader and the scourge of King George III, whom he considered a tyrant, which led Fox to support the American Revolution against him.
78. HUGH FRASER (1918–1984) and Anthony St. Clair-Erskine, 6th Earl of Rosslyn (1917–1977), both served as postwar members of Parliament.
79. WILLIAM DOUGLAS-HOME (1912–1992) was a playwright who ran unsuccessfully for Parliament during World War II, stating his opposition to Winston Churchill's insistence that the struggle be fought until Germany surrendered unconditionally. His brother Alec (1903–1995), who was Macmillan's foreign secretary, succeeded him as prime minister in October 1963.
80. Douglas-Home had written the plays The Reluctant Debutante and The Reluctant Peer.
81. Nine days before his death, the President and his family witnessed a performance on the White House South Grounds by pipers of the Scottish Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment). The Scotsmen were later asked by Mrs. Kennedy to perform in her husband's funeral ceremonies.
82. GIOVANNI AGNELLI (1921–2003) was chief of his family's automobile firm, Fiat.
83. ARISTOTLE ONASSIS (1906–1975) based his family, business, and yacht Christina in Monaco in the late 1950s and was frequently host to the aged Churchill and his wife Clementine. The Kennedys actually met Churchill aboard Onassis's yacht during both the summers of 1955 and 1959.
84. KONRAD ADENAUER (1876–1967) was the first chancellor of postwar West Germany, retiring in 1963. JFK's admiration for Adenauer's role in building German democracy was tempered by his annoyance at Adenauer's ceaseless demands that the United States demonstrate its commitment to defend West Berlin from Communist threat.
85. WILHELM GREWE (1911–2000) was Adenauer's Washington envoy. The Pakistani diplomat was Aziz Ahmed (1906–1982).
86. JOHN DIEFENBAKER (1895–1979) was the Conservative prime minister of Canada when the Kennedys made their first official foreign visit there in May 1961. During their talks, the prime minister could not disguise his low opinion of the informal, young new President. Allegedly one of the Americans accidentally left behind a document, written by Kennedy's aide Walt Rostow, on which the President had casually scribbled his view that the fusty Diefenbaker was an "S.O.B.," and which urged an effort to "push" the Canadians on various subjects. (During the trip, Kennedy also badly reinjured his back while planting a ceremonial tree.) The following year, JFK further antagonized Diefenbaker by inviting the leader of his opposition, the Liberal party's Lester Pearson, whom Kennedy had known during his tenure as ambassador in Washington, to a White House dinner and seeing Pearson privately for a half hour. While campaigning for reelection, Diefenbaker tried to shake the Americans' obvious preference for Pearson's party by threatening to release the offending memorandum of 1961, warning that "all Canadians" would resent the evidence of American lordliness. JFK ordered his envoy in Ottawa to stand up to Diefenbaker. He later denied to Ben Bradlee that he had written "S.O.B." on any paper and wondered aloud why Diefenbaker hadn't done "what any normal, friendly government would do . . . make a photostatic copy, and return the original." (To the President's delight, Diefenbaker's party lost.)
87. CHARLES AUBREY SMITH (1863–1948) was a British actor and stereotypical Englishman, who looked like Georges Vanier.
88. This was in May 1960, when de Gaulle came to Washington as Eisenhower's guest.
89. Referring to the Kennedys' triumphal reception in France when they were received by de Gaulle for a state visit in May 1961, before the Vienna summit with Khrushchev.
90. De Gaulle's efforts to distance France from NATO and the United States in order to demonstrate French singularity and grandeur.
91. ANDRé MALRAUX (1901–1976), art historian, n
ovelist, and brave hero of the French Resistance during World War II, was de Gaulle's minister of culture. His 1938 novel L'Espoir (Man's Hope) was based on his experience fighting alongside anti-fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. "For the most part," Malraux once wrote, "man is what he hides." Jacqueline had read Malraux's books closely and was drawn to his life story, humanist sympathies, mastery of cultural history, and his belief that the arts and architecture could elevate a society ("the sum," he had written, "of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the course of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved"). She asked to meet Malraux during the state visit to Paris and hear him speak about some of the paintings she most admired.
92. Jacqueline had sent word that in his grief, Malraux need not bother with her, but he insisted on keeping his commitment to be her host, which touched her deeply. At the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, the great French museum, Malraux stood before canvases by Manet, Renoir, and Cézanne and reacted to them. He had also had Bouguereau's The Birth of Venus moved beside Manet's Olympia so that Mrs. Kennedy could view the two nudes in juxtaposition. During their visit to the Château de Malmaison, which had been restored by Napoleon's Empress Josephine and served as the seat of French government from 1800 to 1802, he lectured her about the turbulent Bonaparte marriage. "What a destiny!" said Jacqueline. After touring the house and its famous rose garden, she felt newly inspired in her efforts to improve the White House and its grounds, which benefited from her knowledge of French literature, history, and art. Her instant intellectual communion with Malraux led to a correspondence by diplomatic pouch. In April 1962, she happily showed him through the National Gallery in Washington and, along with the President, honored him at a dinner for the Western Hemisphere's Nobel laureates, which JFK, in his toast, pronounced the most extraordinary White House gathering of talent since Jefferson had dined there alone. During the gallery tour, Jacqueline suggested an American visit by the Mona Lisa, which rarely left the Louvre. With the assent of de Gaulle, who was willing to make a friendly gesture toward Kennedy if it required no relinquishment of French political power, Malraux defied the Paris arts bureaucracy and arranged "a personal loan" of the Mona Lisa (which he considered "the subtlest homage genius has paid to a living face") to the President and Jacqueline. In January 1963, the Kennedys welcomed Malraux and his wife to the National Gallery for the unveiling. A million and a half people viewed the painting in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. That November, on hearing of the President's assassination, Malraux cabled the First Lady, "Nous pensons a vous et nous sommes si tristes" ("We think of you and we are so sad"). When Malraux published his autobiography, Anti-Memoirs, in 1968, he dedicated it to Jacqueline.
93. Referring to Glen Ora, where the Kennedys gave Malraux and his wife a Sunday champagne brunch.
94. IRWIN SHAW (1913–1984) was an American novelist, whose first book was The Young Lions. The Maquis were guerrillas of the French Resistance, mainly in the countryside.
95. HERVé ALPHAND (1907–1994) was French ambassador to Washington, much aided by his wife Nicole (1917–1979).
96. RICHARD GOODWIN (1931– ), a former law clerk under Justice Felix Frankfurter, had worked for JFK since 1959 as campaign speechwriter, assistant special counsel, and diplomat, and was slated in November 1963 to replace August Heckscher (1913–1997) as the President's chief adviser on the arts. While in Paris, Jacqueline had consulted Malraux about the possibility of creating an American counterpart to Malraux's culture ministry and "what was realistic" to expect.
THE SIXTH CONVERSATION
1. Since 1958, Khrushchev had been issuing deadlines and using other tactics in an effort to force the United States and other Western powers out of West Berlin.
2. Adenauer stepped down as chancellor in October 1963.
3. JFK's television speech from the Oval Office on the Berlin crisis of July 25, 1961, in which he announced a defense budget increase and call-ups of American reservists.
4. The President's exact words were these: "I hear it said that West Berlin is militarily untenable. And so was Bastogne. And so, in fact, was Stalingrad. Any dangerous spot is tenable if men—brave men—will make it so."
5. Referring to Eisenhower's often intractable secretary of state, John Foster Dulles (1888–1959).
6. "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate"—an admonition contributed to the speech by Galbraith.
7. Notably after the missile crisis, when Kennedy ordered his aides not to crow about the apparent American victory, explaining that if Khrushchev felt embarrassed, the Russian might feel compelled to launch some other gambit that might take the world to the edge of destruction. The President also knew that his private settlement with Khrushchev was less clear-cut than the public impression that he had managed to win the Soviet leader's unconditional surrender. In fact, Khrushchev had made a tacit deal with Kennedy to remove the missiles if the President would force the withdrawal of (outmoded) NATO missiles from Turkey and (on condition that Castro would permit on-site inspections of his military installations, which he never did) pledge never to authorize a U.S. invasion of Cuba.
8. JAWAHARLAL NEHRU (1889–1964), the Indian prime minister and Gandhi lieutenant who had been imprisoned during his country's independence struggle, came to the United States in November 1961. Kennedy found Nehru grimly unaffected by his charm. He later called it "the worst head-of-state visit I have had." (Actually Nehru was merely a head of government.)
9. From the Newport naval station, the Kennedys took Nehru to the Auchincloss estate, Hammersmith Farm.
10. His sister Patricia.
11. In fact, it was 1951.
12. During his visit to Southeast Asia, Kennedy greatly annoyed the commander of French forces in Indochina, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, by asking why the Vietnamese should want to give their lives merely so that their country would remain a French possession.
13. ANGIER BIDDLE DUKE (1915–1995) was a tobacco heir and diplomat who served as JFK's chief of protocol.
14. INDIRA GANDHI (1917–1984) later succeeded her father as Indian prime minister.
15. LEMOYNE BILLINGS (1916–1981), a New York advertising executive, had been Kennedy's friend since their time at Choate School. Mrs. Kennedy told the chief of the Executive Mansion's household staff that Billings had been their houseguest "every weekend since I've been married."
16. Meaning the Yellow Oval Room in the family quarters, which Jacqueline was transforming into an elegant parlor.
17. VENGALIL KRISHNAN KRISHNA MENON (1896–1974) was Nehru's defense minister and an impassioned critic of U.S. foreign policy.
18. MARIAN CANNON SCHLESINGER (1912– ) was the painter daughter of a Harvard physiology teacher, who indeed endorsed Stevenson in 1960.
19. "Can't you control your wife? Or are you like me?"
20. When Schlesinger announced his support of JFK before the 1960 convention, some old friends and Stevenson backers denounced him as a Benedict Arnold.
21. This refers to Mrs. Kennedy's official visit to India of March 1962, which she diplomatically balanced afterward with a stopover in the country's rival, Pakistan.
22. KRISHNA NEHRU HUTHEESING (1907–1967), a writer, was the prime minister's youngest sister.
23. Meaning the future Kennedy Library.
24. In the fall of 1961, after the Vienna summit, the Berlin Crisis, and the building of the Berlin Wall, Khrushchev tried to demonstrate Soviet might by ordering the largest nuclear test explosions ever. A furious JFK felt compelled to resume U.S. testing.
25. BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872–1970) was a British pacifist, philosopher, and Nobel laureate in literature.
26. DAVID LAWRENCE (1888–1973) was a conservative journalist and founder of U.S. News & World Report.
27. In 1958.
28. Actually in October 1963.
29. Mrs. Kennedy did not know Macmillan remotely as well as the President had, but after Kennedy's death,
she achieved a moving kind of intimacy with her husband's British friend by letter. At the end of January 1964, at midnight, she wrote Macmillan by hand in response to his condolence letter: "Sometimes I become so bitter, only alone—I don't tell anyone—but I do truly think that any poor school child looking at the record of the 1960s—could only decide that virtue is UNrewarded. The two greatest men of our time, you and Jack—all you fought for and cared about together. . . . And how does it all turn out? De Gaulle is there . . . and bitter old Adenauer—and the two people who have had to suffer are you and Jack. . . . You worked together for the finest things in the finest years—later on when a series of disastrous Presidents of the United States, and Prime Ministers who were not like you, will have botched up everything—people will say Do you remember those days—how perfect they were?' The days of you and Jack. . . . I always keep thinking of Camelot—which is overly sentimental—but I know I am right—for one brief shining moment there was Camelot—and it will never be that way again. . . . Please forgive this endless intrusion—but I just wanted to tell you how much Jack loved you—and I have not his gift of concision." Macmillan replied, "My dear Friend—this is how I used to write to Jack—so I am going to write it to you. . . . You have written from your heart to me, and I will do the same. . . . Of course one becomes bitter. How could you not be? . . . May God Bless you, my dear child. You have shown the most wonderful courage to the bitter outer world. The hard thing is really to feel it inside." On June 1, 1964, the day before this oral history interview, Jacqueline reported to Macmillan that she was feeling better now and the worst had passed. Later she wrote him that she was trying to raise her children as Jack would have wished—and that if she prevailed, then that would be her vengeance against the world. (This was one reason why, in later years, Jacqueline was particularly cheered when told by friends that she had succeeded as a mother.)
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