Grace and POWER
THE PRIVATE WORLD of THE KENNEDY WHITE HOUSE
SALLY BEDELL SMITH
RANDOM HOUSE
New York
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
The Kennedy Court
Preface
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
Photo Insert
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Photo Insert
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Photo Insert
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
EPILOGUE
SOURCE NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
ALSO BY SALLY BEDELL SMITH
Copyright Page
For Stephen, Kirk, Lisa, and David
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
—EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY,
“FIRST FIG”
THE KENNEDY COURT
JANUARY 1961
JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY, 43. President of the United States.
JACQUELINE BOUVIER KENNEDY, 31. First Lady.
JOSEPH PATRICK KENNEDY, 72. Father of the President. Principal architect of JFK’s rise in politics.
ROSE FITZGERALD KENNEDY, 70. Mother of the President. Family organizer and White House hostess in Jackie’s absence.
ROBERT FRANCIS KENNEDY, 35. Attorney General of the United States. De facto Vice President and confidant of JFK. Jack’s proxy for conveying difficult messages and gathering information. His extroverted wife, Ethel, 32, an honorary Kennedy sister.
EDWARD MOORE KENNEDY, 28. Youngest Kennedy sibling. More outgoing than either Jack or Bobby. Elected to U.S. Senate from Massachusetts in 1962. His wife, Joan, 24, and Jackie often sought privacy from the Kennedy clan—Joan to play the piano, Jackie to paint.
PATRICIA KENNEDY LAWFORD, 36. Sister married to British actor Peter, 37. Lived in California where she and her husband entertained JFK at parties stocked with Hollywood actresses.
EUNICE KENNEDY SHRIVER, 39. Sister closest to JFK. Advocate for the handicapped and mentally retarded. Her husband, Sargent, 45, was JFK’s first director of the Peace Corps.
JEAN KENNEDY SMITH, 32. Most demure of the Kennedy sisters, and closest to Jackie. Her husband, Stephen, 33, served as a key political operative for JFK and ran the Kennedy family business.
JOSEPH ALSOP, 50. Influential columnist for the Washington Post known for his erudition and hauteur. Famous Georgetown host and early booster of JFK. Advised Jackie on such matters as using power in Washington and handling female reporters she called “harpies.”
JANET LEE AUCHINCLOSS, 59. Jackie’s mother. Avid horsewoman and meticulous hostess. Like Rose Kennedy, frequently stood in for Jackie at official events. Her husband, Hugh, 58, Jackie’s devoted stepfather, provided an idyllic upbringing in an old WASP setting.
LETITIA BALDRIGE, 34. Knew Jackie at Miss Porter’s School and Vassar. As her first White House social secretary, orchestrated Jackie’s official life in the White House for more than two years.
CHARLES BARTLETT, 39. Columnist for the Chattanooga Times. Friend of JFK from postwar years and of Jackie from her late teens, and played matchmaker between the two. Provided constant stream of advice and intelligence to JFK in the White House.
KIRK LEMOYNE “LEM” BILLINGS, 44. JFK’s oldest friend. So ubiquitous at the White House that he kept a set of clothing in his own guest room. Eunice Shriver said Billings offered her brother “a complete liberation of the spirit.”
MCGEORGE BUNDY, 41. National Security Adviser. Admired for a mind of “dazzling clarity and speed.” So supremely confident it was said he could “strut sitting down.” An influential voice on foreign policy.
BENJAMIN BRADLEE, 39. Washington bureau chief for Newsweek. Handsome, irreverent, and shrewd, he shared Kennedy’s passion for political gossip. His wife, Antoinette “Tony,” 36, was a favorite of the President.
OLEG CASSINI, 47. Jackie’s official couturier who also designed dresses for JFK’s sisters. With his brother Igor “Ghighi,” 44 (Hearst gossip columnist Cholly Knickerbocker), frequented the Kennedy court, usually with an attractive woman to adorn the White House dinner table.
VIVIAN “VIVI” CRESPI, 33. Friend of Jackie’s since childhood in Newport. Ex-wife of Marco Fabio Crespi, an Italian count. A glamorous presence at White House dinners and weekends in Hyannis and Newport.
CLARENCE DOUGLAS DILLON, 51. Secretary of the Treasury. Patrician Republican investment banker. Veteran of the Eisenhower years. Owner of Haut-Brion vineyard. Known for his rarefied tastes and homes filled with exquisite art and furniture.
PAUL “RED” FAY, 42. Under Secretary of the Navy. Friend of JFK from navy PT boat days. Referred to as JFK’s “Falstaff” who was “full of the old malarky.” Shared JFK’s penchant for teasing and banter.
EVE FOUT, 31. Jackie’s closest friend in the Virginia hunt country. Expert rider and astute judge of horseflesh. Along with her husband, Paul, 33, rode frequently with Jackie and oversaw care of her horses.
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, 52. Harvard economist who served as ambassador to India. As JFK’s adviser without portfolio, he traveled back to Washington a half dozen times in two years. Author of “impertinent cables” devoured by the President and First Lady.
DAVID ORMSBY GORE, 42. Britain’s ambassador to the United States. Considered the eleventh member of the Kennedy cabinet. Soigné aristocrat related to JFK by marriage. Friend since college days. Had the effortless grace Kennedy prized, with brainpower that JFK felt exceeded even Bundy’s.
LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON, 52. Vice President of the United States. Formerly Senate majority leader and Washington’s most formidable power broker. Deeply resentful of Bobby Kennedy, who reciprocated the dislike. Wife, Claudia “Lady Bird,” 48, frequently filled in for Jackie at official events.
ROBERT MCNAMARA, 44. Secretary of Defense. Former “Whiz Kid” and president of Ford Motor Company. Famous for his bravura recitations of facts and figures. Favorite of Jackie, with whom he read poetry aloud.
RACHEL LAMBERT “BUNNY” MELLON, 49. Known for her rarefied taste and perfectionism, designer of the White House Rose Garden, creator of the East Garden, and quiet adviser on numerous matters of entertaining and style. A “very motherly figure” for Jackie. Wife of Paul, 53, enormously wealthy connoisseur of art and thoroughbreds.
MARY PINCHOT MEYER, 40. Lover of Jack Kennedy for the last two years of his presidency. Vassar graduate like Jackie. Ethereal artist with unconventional attitudes. Sister of Ben Bradlee’s wife, Tony, a connection that provided convenient camouflage.
LAWRENCE O’BRIEN, 43. JFK’s liaison with Congress. Son of a Massachusetts saloon keeper, highly regarded for keen political judgment. Bobby Kennedy said he could “talk the bal
ls off a brass monkey.”
KENNETH O’DONNELL, 36. White House Appointments Secretary. Supervisor of JFK’s schedule, logistical organizer, and political sounding board. Known as the “Wolfhound,” the “Cobra,” and the “Iceman.” Frequently abrasive, notoriously taciturn, and ferociously loyal.
DAVE POWERS, 48. The Kennedy court jester. Official White House greeter who entertained JFK with jokes and political lore. Often kept JFK company when Jackie was away, and would not leave until the President said, “Good night, pal, will you please put out the light?”
LEE BOUVIER RADZIWILL, 27. Jackie’s younger sister and companion. Lived in London, but made frequent visits to the White House and Palm Beach and shared several long holidays with Jackie in Europe. Husband, Stanislas “Stas,” 46, was a colorful Polish prince who made a small fortune in London real estate.
JAMES REED, 41. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Friend of JFK from navy days in the Pacific. Yankee Republican who tramped through Civil War battlefields with JFK and shared his fondness for poetry of Emily Dickinson and Robert Burns.
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT JR., 46. Under Secretary of Commerce. Fifth child of the thirty-second president. His campaigning helped turn crucial West Virginia primary to Kennedy. Former congressman whose drinking doomed his own political career.
ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER JR., 43. White House gadfly, troubleshooter, and unofficial historian of the Kennedy years. Dubbed the “court philosopher” by The New Yorker. Pulitzer Prize–winning author and Harvard professor. Adviser to Jackie on everything from books for the White House library to foreign films for the screening room.
FLORENCE PRITCHETT SMITH, 40. Jack Kennedy’s most important female friend. Vivacious hostess in New York and Palm Beach. Dated JFK in his bachelor days. Wealthy stockbroker husband, Earl, 57, was former U.S. ambassador to Cuba, friendly with Joe Kennedy as well as Jackie’s family in Newport.
THEODORE SORENSEN, 32. Special Counsel to the President. JFK’s chief wordsmith and “intellectual blood bank” as well as adviser on domestic and foreign policy. Workaholic with a formidable memory who had an intense meeting of minds with JFK but strikingly little personal closeness.
CHARLES SPALDING, 42. Friend from prewar years. Yale graduate and author of best-selling comic memoir at age twenty-five. Dabbled in Hollywood screenwriting and Manhattan advertising. Shared JFK’s fondness for gossip, humor, and womanizing.
ADLAI STEVENSON, 60. Ambassador to the United Nations. Former governor of Illinois and two-time Democratic candidate for president. Helped launch JFK’s career and laid the groundwork for many initiatives of the Kennedy administration. A confidant of Jackie, with whom he shared cultural interests.
NANCY TUCKERMAN, 31. White House Social Secretary for the final six months of Kennedy administration. Jackie’s oldest friend and closest confidante, known as “Tucky.” Met in fifth grade at Manhattan’s Chapin School and attended Miss Porter’s together.
PAMELA TURNURE, 23. Jackie Kennedy’s press secretary. Previously worked in JFK’s Senate office. Their relationship drew public attention when Turnure’s landlady photographed the senator leaving her Georgetown house and distributed pictures to journalists.
WILLIAM WALTON, 51. Irreverent artist and former journalist with unmatched knowledge of Washington’s historic, political, social and cultural cross currents. Called “Billy Boy” by JFK. Adviser to the President and First Lady on the arts.
JAYNE LARKIN WRIGHTSMAN, 41. Friend and close adviser on Jackie’s redecoration of the White House. Respected for sophisticated knowledge of furniture and decorative arts. Wife of wealthy Texas oilman Charles, 65. Hostess to the Kennedys at palatial oceanfront home in Palm Beach.
PREFACE
They certainly have acquired something we have lost—a casual sort of grandeur about their evenings, always at the end of the day’s business, the promise of parties, and pretty women, and music and beautiful clothes, and champagne, and all that. I must say there is something very 18th century about your new young man, an aristocratic touch.
—BRITISH PRIME MINISTER HAROLD MACMILLAN ON JOHN AND JACQUELINE KENNEDY AND THEIR WHITE HOUSE CIRCLE
On November 29, 1963—a week after the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas—his widow, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, summoned presidential chronicler Theodore H. White to the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. She wanted White to write an essay about her husband for Life, the magazine that had celebrated the Kennedys in words and photographs for more than a decade.
Jackie Kennedy spoke for four hours, until just past midnight, with “composure,” a “calm voice,” and “total recall.” It was a rambling monologue about the assassination, her late husband’s love of history dating from his sickly childhood, and her views on how he should be remembered. She didn’t want him immortalized by “bitter” men such as New York Times columnist Arthur Krock and Merriman Smith, the AP White House correspondent. Well versed in the classics, she said she felt “ashamed” that she was unable to come up with a lofty historical metaphor for the Kennedy presidency.
Instead, she told White, her “obsession” was a song from the popular Broadway show Camelot, by Alan Jay Lerner (a JFK friend from boarding school and college) and Frederick Loewe, which opened only weeks after Kennedy was elected. The sentimental musical popularized the legend of the British medieval King Arthur, his wife Queen Guinevere, and the heroic knights of the Round Table. Jackie recounted to White that at night before going to sleep, Jack Kennedy listened to Camelot on his “old Victrola.” “I’d get out of bed at night and play it for him when it was so cold getting out of bed,” she said. His favorite lines were at the end of the record: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”
White spent only forty-five minutes writing “For President Kennedy: An Epilogue,” a thousand-word reminiscence for Life’s December 6 issue. With close editing by Jackie Kennedy (among her numerous alterations, she changed “this was the idea that she wanted to share” to “this was the idea that transfixed her”), the piece set forth the Camelot metaphor that has defined the Kennedy presidency for four decades. At an exhibit of Jackie Kennedy’s designer clothing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington in 2001 and 2002, the Lerner and Loewe tune played over and over, a soothing loop of background music.
As a child, Jack Kennedy would “devour [stories of] the knights of the Round Table,” according to Jackie. After the Wisconsin primary during the 1960 election campaign, he read The King Must Die, by Mary Renault, about the martyrdom of such folk heroes as Arthur in Britain and Roland in France. Given Kennedy’s middlebrow fondness for show tunes, it was only natural that in May 1962 Jackie invited Frederick Loewe to a small dinner at the White House. At the President’s request, the composer played the score of Camelot on the piano.
Still, many of Kennedy’s friends, especially the intellectuals, have tried to dismiss or downplay the Camelot image as inapt and mawkish, suggesting that it would have made the cool and brainy JFK wince. Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith said Jackie regretted the Camelot association as “overdone.” Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it “myth turned into a cliché. It had no application during President Kennedy’s life. He would have been derisive about it.” Jackie’s conversation with Teddy White, he said, was “her most mischievous interview. The image was mischievous and legendary . . . Camelot itself was not noted for marital constancy, and it ended in blood and death.”
For those very reasons, Jackie Kennedy might well have wished to retract her words. Although the Arthurian legend evoked battlefield bravery (King Arthur and his knights fighting to regain his kingdom) and idealism (the quest for the Holy Grail of perfection by the knights), it also, as Schlesinger pointed out, featured treachery (Arthur’s nephew Mordred seizing his kingdom and taking the queen captive) an
d adultery (the love affair of Guinevere and Arthur’s valiant knight Sir Lancelot).
But Jackie Kennedy never backed away from Camelot. What she wanted to convey was the “magic” of her husband’s presidency—an interlude marked by grand intentions, soaring rhetoric, and high style. At the end of January 1964, in a letter to former British prime minister Harold Macmillan, she conceded that Camelot was “overly sentimental,” but maintained it was “right” because those 1,036 days had been a “brief shining moment” that would not be repeated.
Two years after the assassination, in A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, the book that set the template for the Kennedy years, Schlesinger himself described the period’s “life-affirming, life-enhancing zest, the brilliance, the wit, the cool commitment, the steady purpose.” It was a view that remained undimmed for him, and for many others, despite forty years of tawdry revelations about JFK’s reckless womanizing and his administration’s decision to enlist the mob to assassinate Fidel Castro.
The picture of the Kennedy White House has been blurred by this competition between the Camelot mythology and the powerful impulse to tear it down. Thousands of books, articles, and television documentaries have created a fun-house mirror in which reflections of the Kennedys jump-cut from clarity to distortion. Hopes had been so high, the romance so strong, and the tragedy so great that the everyday reality of the Kennedy White House seemed insufficiently dramatic.
Because Jack and Jackie were such magnetic stars, their supporting players—and their complex interactions with the Kennedys—were often overlooked or given short shrift. But with the passage of time, emotions have softened, and members of the Kennedy circle, including many who have never spoken publicly before, discussed their years in the limelight with detachment and a sense of perspective. Fresh insights were also drawn from previously unavailable letters and personal papers. The story that emerges, recounted in this book, is more compelling than the Kennedy mythologies. It is a story of people selected by history—some with extraordinary talents, others blessed with the gift of loyalty—struggling to guide the United States through perilous times even as they wrestled with their own frailties and the temptations of power. From the remove of four decades, the Kennedy White House emerges not as a model of enlightened government nor as a series of dark conspiracies, but rather as a deeply human place.
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