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

by Caroline Kennedy

  76. On this Mrs. Kennedy was absolutely right. In the spring of 1963, during a meeting when JFK was debating whether to send a civil rights bill to Congress, he asked Johnson for his opinion, and the vice president acidly said he could not respond because no one had given him enough information to have a judgment. In a 1965 oral history interview, Robert Kennedy recalled that during the missile crisis, LBJ "never made any suggestions or recommendations as to what we should do. . . . He was displeased with what we were doing, although he never made it clear what he would do."

  77. During a 1961 trip to Pakistan, LBJ invited a camel driver named Bashir Ahmed to see him in the United States. To his surprise, Ahmed took him up on his offer, and Johnson hosted him for a well-publicized visit to his Texas ranch.

  78. Before the inauguration, Johnson had made a misguided attempt to persuade Democratic members of the Senate to allow him to continue to lead their caucus. When they slapped him down by formal vote, JFK noted that "the steam really went out of Lyndon."

  79. In the last year of his life, JFK asked his friend Charlie Bartlett whether he thought the 1968 Democratic nominee would be "Bobby or Lyndon." Other sources have it that the President was vaguely pondering the liberal North Carolina governor Terry Sanford as a possible 1964 running mate, if necessary, or as the 1968 presidential nominee.

  80. The President hosted a regular breakfast with congressional leaders.

  81. EVERETT DIRKSEN (1896–1969) was senator from Illinois and leader of Senate Republicans from 1959 until his death. Although Dirksen's nineteenth-century style was so different from the President's, JFK had long had an excellent relationship with him. Not so with House Speaker McCormack, who still resented the meteoric political ascent that had enabled Kennedy to best him for control of Massachusetts Democrats. Increasing McCormack's ill humor toward the President was Edward Kennedy's victory over the Speaker's nephew Edward in 1962 for the state's Democratic Senate nomination.

  82. The "someone" was Robert Kennedy.

  83. EDWARD STOCKDALE (1915–1963) was a real estate speculator and Smathers aide who served as JFK's first ambassador to Ireland. Reportedly grief-stricken over the President's assassination, Stockdale fell to his death from a Miami office tower in December 1963.

  84. Kenneth O'Donnell gauged senators in terms of their support for Kennedy measures.

  85. HALE BOGGS (1914–1972) was Democratic congressman from Louisiana and House majority leader.

  86. When he appeared on the JFK 47th birthday broadcast.

  THE SEVENTH CONVERSATION

  1. Kennedy and Macmillan first met at Key West in March 1961. Randolph Churchill (1911–1968) was the journalist son of the ex–prime minister and a Kennedy family friend. As JFK was preparing to leave Nassau, Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker, whom he so disliked, arrived for his own meeting with Macmillan, compelling the President to lunch with Diefenbaker as well as the British prime minister. During the meal, JFK and Macmillan diplomatically pretended that they liked Diefenbaker, and the Canadian pretended to believe it.

  2. In January 1963, de Gaulle abruptly vetoed British membership in the European Common Market, saying the organization would otherwise appear to be "under American domination and direction."

  3. The Mona Lisa came to Washington in January 1963.

  4. The force de frappe refers to the independent nuclear deterrent that de Gaulle was trying to create.

  5. In October 1963, after their Greek cruise on the Onassis yacht, Mrs. Kennedy and her sister Lee stopped in Morocco. Irritated by de Gaulle's rebuffs of her husband's efforts to improve French-American relations, as well as her own, she balked at a stop in Paris on the way home.

  6. In December 1961, the sanctimonious Nehru ordered his troops to seize Portugal's colony of Goa, which lay on India's west coast, surrounded by Indian territory. The Indian prime minister labored to explain how this differed from the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

  7. ADALBERT de SEGONZAC (1920–2002) was Washington correspondent of France-Soir.

  8. Stéphane Boudin, who was advising her on the White House restoration.

  9. The cigar-chomping John "Muggsy" O'Leary (1913–1987) was JFK's driver during the Senate years, then an agent for the Secret Service.

  10. De Gaulle said that the missile crisis had shown that when the crunch came, the United States was willing to act on its own, and therefore might not reliably fulfill its commitments to defend Western Europe.

  11. When President Johnson's diplomats tried to make good on de Gaulle's promise, the French president refused to schedule a visit to America, insisting that his attendance at Kennedy's funeral had already fulfilled his pledge.

  12. After the funeral, Jacqueline received de Gaulle in the Yellow Oval Room and told him that everyone had become so bitter about "this France, England, America thing," but "Jack was never bitter." De Gaulle allowed that President Kennedy had had great influence around the world. With her insistence that every nuance be right, at six that morning, before walking to the service in St. Matthew's, Mrs. Kennedy had called the White House curator and asked him to replace the Cézannes from the Yellow Oval Room with American nineteenth-century aquatints: she wanted the atmosphere for her meetings with de Gaulle and several other foreign leaders to be not French but American. De Gaulle's relationship with JFK had not been wholly negative. During the missile crisis, when Dean Acheson offered to show the French president photographic evidence proving that Soviet missiles were in Cuba, de Gaulle replied that Kennedy's word was good enough for him.

  13. Étienne Burin des Roziers (1913– ) had served under de Gaulle since World War II.

  14. CHARLES "CHIP" BOHLEN (1904–1974) was an old Soviet hand who became JFK's second ambassador to France.

  15. JEAN MONNET (1888–1979) was considered the architect of an integrated post–World War II Europe. Upset that there was no proper award for civilian achievement, only military, President Kennedy had established the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, but did not live to present it to its first recipients, including Monnet, in December 1963.

  16. De Gaulle hosted Macmillan at the French diplomatic retreat Château Rambouillet in December 1962.

  17. AMINTORE FANFANI (1908–1999) was Italian prime minister for most of the Kennedy years, the third of his five tours of duty in that job. As leader of his Christian Democratic party, he had attended the Democratic convention of 1956 as an observer.

  18. JOSIP BROZ TITO (1892–1980), the unifying founder and strongman president of Yugoslavia, was given a luncheon by JFK at the White House in October 1963. Mrs. Kennedy was still in Greece.

  19. VIJAYA LAKSHMI PANDIT (1900–1990) was sent by her brother, Prime Minister Nehru, to London, Moscow, and Washington as his ambassador.

  20. MOHAMMAD AYUB KHAN (1907–1974), president of Pakistan from 1958 to 1969, was the leader for whom the Kennedys had arranged their glittering dinner at Mount Vernon in 1961.

  21. WALTER MCCONAUGHY (1908–2000) was a career Foreign Service officer who had previously served in Burma and South Korea, and was the American ambassador to Pakistan from 1962 to 1966. The State Department wished to suggest that, as with New Delhi, the President had sent an old friend to Islamabad.

  22. WILLIAM MCCORMICK BLAIR (1916– ) was an investment banking heir and close Stevenson aide who became Kennedy's ambassador to Denmark. William Battle (1920–2008), who had helped to rescue JFK in the South Pacific during World War II, was his ambassador to Australia.

  23. The postcolonial Republic of the Congo suffered domestic upheavals during the Kennedy years. Edmund Gullion (1913–1998) and William Attwood (1919–1989) were JFK's ambassadors to the Congo and Guinea, respectively. In 1963, Kennedy considered Gullion for ambassador to South Vietnam before choosing Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., whom he had defeated to enter the U.S. Senate in 1952.

  24. In the summer of 1963, President Diem was cracking down on critics, especially Buddhists. When a Buddhist priest burned himself on a Saigon street, Diem's cold-bloo
ded sister-in-law, Tran Le Xuan (1924–2011), known as Madame Nhu, dismissed the event as a "barbecue." That summer and fall, the President was forced to think seriously about how much he wished to use American military force to support a South Vietnamese leadership that, although anti-Communist, was growing more erratic, autocratic, and corrupt. He approved a coup d'état by South Vietnamese military officers against the Diem brothers, which went out of control and culminated in their assassination. Madame Nhu blamed Kennedy for the deaths of her husband and brother-in-law. When JFK died, American policy toward Vietnam was at a pivot point. In ironic retrospect, this historical moment was like the one Kennedy had asked Professor Donald about. For Lincoln, it was what decisions he would have made about Reconstruction, had he lived, and whether they would have changed history. For Kennedy, the question was about Vietnam.

  25. During their lunch in 1962, Mrs. Luce grandly told him that every president could be described "in one sentence," and that she had been wondering what his sentence would be.

  26. Tish Baldrige had worked for Mrs. Luce in Rome. She had not looked forward to watching her former boss do battle with her current boss over this luncheon.

  27. Not to mention, antagonizing Mrs. Luce's powerful husband.

  28. WAYNE MORSE (1900–1974) was a Democratic senator from Oregon and JFK colleague on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. After Mrs. Luce's stint in Italy, Eisenhower had nominated her for ambassador to Brazil, but then she publicly said that Morse's bad judgment in opposing her appointment must be explained by the fact that in 1951 he had been "kicked in the head by a horse." (Morse was severely injured in the accident.) In the face of outrage from other senators, she refused to retract her insult and asked Ike to withdraw her nomination.

  29. The Luces had built a house in Phoenix. She also took up scuba diving.

  30. In April 1961.

  31. PAUL HARKINS (1904–1984) was the American commander in Vietnam.

  32. JANIO QUADROS (1917–1992) was Brazilian president from January 1961 until he quit in August of that year.

  33. JOAO GOULART (1918–1976) was president of Brazil from 1961 to 1964. JFK was not delighted by Goulart's inclusion of Communist sympathizers in his government, his opposition to American sanctions against Castro, and his efforts to improve relations with Soviet-bloc countries.

  34. JFK's sister Patricia Kennedy Lawford (1924–2006) was married to the British actor Peter Lawford (1923–1984).

  35. Fernando Berckemeyer was the Peruvian ambassador.

  36. JOHN BARTLOW MARTIN (1915–1987) was a journalist and onetime Stevenson aide who was JFK's ambassador to the Dominican Republic, which was led for seven months in 1963 by Juan Bosch Gaviño (1909–2001), the country's first legitimately elected president, who was deposed by a military coup.

  37. In his 1991 memoirs, Rusk insisted that he and JFK had had a private understanding from the start that he could only afford to serve one term at State. But if this was true, it was obviously unknown to Jacqueline, and Rusk clearly changed his mind, since he continued for five more years in the job under President Johnson.

  38. Nigerian slave brokers once used Portuguese coins to create ornamental "slave bracelets"—not the most helpful image for a U.S. diplomat at a time of tumult in his country over civil rights.

  39. The orotund Chester Bowles was Kennedy's first undersecretary of state, George Ball the second.

  40. WALT ROSTOW (1916–2003) was a development economist at MIT, then Bundy's deputy before going to State as director of policy planning.

  41. JEROME WIESNER (1915–1994) had been MIT's president when JFK appointed him as his science adviser.

  42. LLEWELLYN "TOMMY" THOMPSON (1904–1972), son of Colorado sheep ranchers, joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1929 and came to specialize in the Soviet Union, serving as ambassador to Moscow from 1957 to 1962. At the start of the missile crisis, JFK had wanted Bohlen to delay his departure. He knew Bohlen well and that, as ambassador to Moscow from 1953 to 1957, Bohlen had developed a sophisticated understanding of Khrushchev and his circle. Instead it was Thompson who advised JFK during the missile crisis. Although the President had been little acquainted with him, as it turned out, the self-effacing Thompson was in a position to provide insights on the Soviet leadership that were of more recent vintage than Bohlen's.

  43. WALTER HELLER (1915–1987), chairman of Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisors, was the Buffalo-born son of German immigrants and a University of Minnesota economist.

  44. DAVID BELL (1919–2000) and Kermit Gordon (1916–1976) were Kennedy's successive chiefs of what was then called the Bureau of the Budget.

  45. In November 1961, JFK had created the Agency for International Development, which dispensed foreign aid and was suffering growing pains.

  46. FOWLER HAMILTON (1911–1984) was Kennedy's first AID administrator.

  47. HENRY LABOUISSE (1904–1987), known as "Harry," a social friend of the Kennedys, had been chief of AID's forerunner agency and became JFK's ambassador to Greece in 1962.

  48. BYRON WHITE (1917–2002) was an All-American football halfback from Colorado, where he gained the nickname "Whizzer," and a Rhodes Scholar whom JFK had met in London before World War II. By coincidence, he was one of the naval intelligence officers who wrote reports on Kennedy's heroism commanding the PT-109. White joined the Supreme Court in April 1962 and proved more conservative than Kennedy and his people had expected.

  49. PAUL FREUND (1908–1992), a Harvard Law School professor and giant of constitutional law, turned down President Kennedy's invitation to be solicitor general. JFK also considered him for the high court before choosing Arthur Goldberg.

  50. WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS (1898–1980), liberal, civil libertarian, and environmentalist, had been a close Kennedy family friend since his work with Joseph Kennedy on the Securities Exchange Commission in the 1930s.

  51. Rowland Evans of the New York Herald Tribune, Hugh Sidey (1927–2005) of Time, and William Lawrence (1916–1972) of the New York Times and later ABC News.

  52. RALPH de TOLEDANO (1916–2007) was a founder of the conservative William F. Buckley's National Review who was close to Nixon.

  53. Sick of criticism by the New York paper, the goal of which—he suspected—was to boom Nelson Rockefeller for 1964, Kennedy cancelled his subscription, causing a momentary Washington cause célèbre.

  54. In the early 1960s, such a practice, routine for modern presidents, seemed so new that at a press conference, JFK was once asked about his efforts to "manage the news."

  55. As a girl touring the White House in 1940, Jackie was disappointed that there was no guidebook available.

  56. JFK preferred hats to scarves.

  57. Eager to preserve her children's privacy, Jacqueline was horrified when Salinger once told a reporter about one of their pets, a beer-loving rabbit called Zsa Zsa.

  58. RALPH DUNGAN (1923– ) and Myer Feldman (1914–2007) were both White House staff members.

  59. She refers here especially to the turf-conscious Ken O'Donnell, who disliked Sorensen and Schlesinger. One sign of JFK's ability to keep all of these disparate factions working together is the fact that he never had a chief of staff. Always wary of finding himself on the "leading strings" of an aide, he had all top members of his staff report directly to him.

  60. While living in the White House, Caroline attended a school established by her mother in the White House solarium. Most of her fellow students were children of administration officials.

  61. GEORGE BURKLEY (1902–1991) was a navy admiral and served as the President's primary physician after Dr. Travell was removed from his case (in keeping with JFK's compact with Dr. Kraus), although Travell publicly retained her official title.

  62. After damaging his back in the Ottawa tree planting, JFK once privately forecast that John would be able to lift him before he could ever expect to lift his son.

  63. The First Family by the nightclub comedian Vaughn Meader was the fastest-selling record in history, s
elling an astonishing 7.5 million copies. As Kennedy told a press conference, he thought Meader's impersonation of him sounded "more like Teddy than it did me."

  64. BONNIE ANGELO (1924– ) covered Mrs. Kennedy as First Lady for Time magazine.

  65. In 1962, My Daddy Is President, by the seven-year-old "Little Jo Ann" Morse, sung in baby talk with a bossa nova beat, was a 45-rpm jukebox favorite. Among the lyrics: "No matter what I do, it makes a news event. / 'Cause my Daddy is the President."

  66. NICHOLAS KATZENBACH (1922– ), who was imprisoned by the Italians and Germans as a prisoner of war for two years during World War II, served as RFK's deputy, and under President Johnson, as his successor.

  67. It was ultimately LBJ who established "Volunteers in Service to America" (VISTA) in 1964 as part of his "War on Poverty"—another program that adapted some of the ideas JFK was considering at the time of his death. Worried that his proposed tax cuts would do little to help the jobless and poor, Kennedy had wanted to help poor families like those who had so affected him while campaigning in West Virginia in 1960. Told about this, the new President Johnson seized the notion with both hands. In January 1964, during his first State of the Union message, a speech written largely by Sorensen, Johnson declared "unconditional war on poverty in America."