Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  The President-elect rapidly moved beyond his quip, as he typically did, always impatient for the next topic. In a jovial tone he asked each of his guests to suggest an administration appointment. Bradlee said Kennedy should replace Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA for nearly a decade, and Walton made a comparable suggestion for FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been in power for thirty-six years. Kennedy seemed to agree, and when the newspapers announced the following day the reappointment of both men, Walton and Bradlee were taken aback.

  In the case of Hoover, Kennedy had little choice; the FBI director enjoyed extraordinary leverage over him that was tantamount to blackmail. For more than a year in the early 1940s, the agency had conducted surveillance of a lover of JFK’s named Inga Arvad, who was a suspected Nazi spy. The statuesque Danish divorcée had kept company with Hitler and some of his deputies, writing afterwards that the Führer was “not evil as he is depicted by the enemies of Germany” and was “without doubt an idealist.” Even after JFK had been alerted to the FBI bugs and wiretaps, he had continued his assignations. JFK’s defiance was a measure of his penchant for personal risk, and the degree to which he was besotted by the sexiness of a woman four years his senior who once boasted, “He’s got a lot to learn, and I’ll be happy to teach him.”

  Kennedy knew that Hoover held the FBI dossier containing vivid accounts of his trysts with “Inga Binga.” But JFK was unaware that the FBI had also been tracking his sexual adventures during the presidential campaign. Among his paramours was Judith Campbell (later Judith Exner), a former girlfriend of Frank Sinatra and now occasional mistress of the mobster Sam Giancana. Sinatra had introduced them in February 1960, during a campaign stop in Las Vegas, because he thought her resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor would appeal to JFK. By the fall of 1960, the FBI had not yet identified Campbell; informants had indicated only that he might have been “compromised” by a woman in Las Vegas.

  Neither Walton nor Bradlee had a clue about any of this. Their audacious proposal to dismiss two icons of national security could only have been made by men confident of their closeness to Kennedy. Walton was nearly a decade older than Kennedy, and they had been friends since JFK first served in Congress in 1947. The son of an Illinois newspaper publisher, Walton had parachuted into Normandy on D-Day as a war correspondent. But he had quit journalism at age forty to become a painter. He was witty, cultivated, and a friend of Ernest Hemingway.

  With his “gloriously florid” jug ears, his crooked grin, and a pockmarked face, Walton looked “rather like a clever and funny Hallowe’en pumpkin,” wrote Hemingway’s former wife Martha Gellhorn. Walton spoke in a languid baritone punctuated by warm conspiratorial chuckles. Kennedy loved gossip, and Walton always managed to have the most up-to-date intelligence. Walton was forthright and occasionally gruff, with a detached air—a sort of “been-there, done-that” manner. His wit was “glorious fun,” wrote Gellhorn. “He hasn’t a pompous bone in his body.”

  Bradlee had entered Kennedy’s orbit early in 1959 during a Sunday afternoon walk in their Georgetown neighborhood. Bradlee had recently returned from a reporting stint in Paris and had been married for three years to Tony, his second wife. She was from the prominent Pinchot family and had left her husband for Ben after a love affair that began in a nineteenth-century chateau. Four years younger than JFK, Bradlee was a natural friend for an ambitious young politician. Bradlee’s family mingled three centuries of Boston Brahmins and New York sophisticates (his mother’s family included Frank Crowninshield, the founder of Vanity Fair). Like Kennedy, he was a boarding-school boy (St. Mark’s) and Harvard graduate as well as a World War II navy veteran.

  Their conversation invariably focused on “the private lives and public postures of politicians, reporters, and friends”—what Sorensen described as “nineteenth-century court gossip.” Bradlee had a deliberately salty manner and an agile mind; he seemed to pluck his thoughts from the air without a trace of deliberation or predictability. He was unconventional enough to have a couple of tattoos: a snake entwined in his initials on his right buttock, and a rooster below his left shoulder. Bradlee exuded virility and prep-school cool, with his dark hair slicked back and parted with knife-edge precision. He embodied nearly all the traits Kennedy prized: high style, good looks, cheeky humor, worldliness, and self-assurance. As Bradlee recognized, “You had to have a light touch to get to Jack, to get through his defenses.”

  “I married a whirlwind,” Jackie Kennedy once said. “People who try to keep up with [Jack] drop like flies, including me.” In the ten weeks between the election and the inaugural, the Kennedy presidency took shape, as both Jack and Jackie laid the groundwork for the next four years by selecting key people and establishing themes and priorities. Instead of operating out of one command post, Jack Kennedy couldn’t quite kick the campaign habit during the transition. He logged thousands of miles on the Caroline, the Kennedy family’s private airplane, rarely staying in one place for more than a few days at a time: Florida, Washington, Texas, Massachusetts, and New York. He quizzed job candidates, met with dignitaries, tapped friends and “wise men” for advice, read one novel (Anthony Trollope’s The Warden), gave interviews to reporters and columnists, swam in rough Florida surf, played touch football, cast for bluefish, digested memos and reports, spent hours on the phone checking references, sat through marathon meetings, played golf and tennis, held nineteen press conferences, saw a play (Gore Vidal’s The Best Man), and gave a memorable speech to the Massachusetts legislature extolling government as “a city upon a hill” with “the eyes of all people . . . upon us.”

  His most awkward mission came in response to an invitation from the Vice President–elect, Lyndon Johnson, to visit his ranch in Texas. “We’ll kill a deer,” Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, said with a smile. Kennedy had indulged in grouse shooting in Britain as a young man, and more recently had shot quail, but he was a reluctant participant in blood sports. Johnson pressed him nevertheless as they waited in a carpeted blind for the deer to be driven toward them. When Kennedy brought down two bucks with three rounds, Johnson gushed that Kennedy was a “terrific shot.” The President-elect couldn’t help retorting, “Lyndon, I thank you for that, but I took a close look. That deer had rope burns on his legs.”

  The clashing sensibilities—a profound difference in tone and style—of Kennedy and Johnson would mark their relationship from beginning to end. They had been cordial but wary colleagues in the Senate, where Johnson had reigned as majority leader for five years, widely regarded as the second most powerful man in Washington after President Eisenhower. In Johnson’s own vernacular, he was a “whale” and the junior senator from Massachusetts a mere “minnow.” “To Johnson . . . [JFK] was the enviably attractive nephew who sings an Irish ballad for the company, and then winsomely disappears before the table clearing and dishwashing begin,” wrote Harry McPherson, Johnson’s longtime aide.

  Kennedy and Johnson were by nearly every measure opposites. In his appearance, Johnson surpassed Kennedy only with his sheer size; four inches taller, he could stretch himself to a seemingly even greater height. His arms were disproportionately long, his hands like baseball mitts. Compared to the handsome President-elect, LBJ’s face was powerful but irregular, with droopy dark eyes, a large nose, prominent ears, and a strong cleft chin.

  Johnson had been born dirt poor nine years before Jack Kennedy; as a young man LBJ had picked cotton and worked in harness with mules on a road gang. While the serenely cerebral Kennedy was graceful and discerning, Johnson was moody, lumbering, and coarse. “Lyndon was a powerhouse who filled a room,” said Ben Bradlee. “Jack was more demure.” Johnson was overwhelmingly physical in his behavior: poking chests, grasping shoulders, leaning close. “He’d suck your guts out,” said Orville Freeman, the governor of Minnesota who became Kennedy’s secretary of agriculture. “He gave you the feeling that he was putting his tentacles around you.”

  Kennedy and Johnson were as different in speech as they were in man
ner. Kennedy was casually terse, sometimes stopping short of a finished sentence when he had made his point; Johnson was legendarily loquacious, repeating something a dozen different ways to make sure he was understood. It was, in a sense, a generational difference between speaking for television and addressing the crowds in a dusty Texas courthouse square. Johnson was a gifted storyteller who rarely read a book and tended to get his information from men he trusted. While many of Kennedy’s acolytes underestimated LBJ’s intelligence, JFK recognized the mental agility behind LBJ’s simple words and colorful locutions. Like Kennedy, Johnson had an impressive memory—for facts, names, and situations.

  Kennedy cringed at Johnson’s public vulgarity—urinating in a sink in his office, scratching his crotch, picking his nose—and dismissed LBJ as “uncouth and somewhat of an oaf.” Yet he admired Johnson’s drive, cunning, and dedication, viewing him as a talented workhorse deeply knowledgeable about the intricacies of legislative politics. Since his election to Congress in 1936 at age twenty-eight as an ardent New Dealer, Johnson had been building his base, cultivating allies, accumulating IOUs, flattering, and trading favors—in short, using every trick in the political playbook.

  Kennedy’s selection of Johnson as vice president had been crucial to the Democratic victory. While LBJ did not actively oppose Kennedy for the presidency in 1960, he maneuvered behind the scenes to gather delegates and strike alliances to deny Kennedy a first-ballot victory and emerge as a compromise candidate at the convention. The strategy failed, but Johnson still logged the second highest tally of votes by a significant margin. As liberals screeched that an old-fashioned conservative southerner besmirched Kennedy’s message of youth and vigor, Kennedy told his aides that Johnson could deliver the South and take “the Catholic flavor off me.” Joe Kennedy, the ultimate pragmatist, endorsed the choice as “the smartest thing” JFK ever did.

  Kennedy also preferred to have Johnson as a “collaborator . . . than . . . competitor” on Capitol Hill. “I’m forty-three years old,” Kennedy told his aide Kenny O’Donnell. “I’m not going to die in office. So the vice-presidency doesn’t mean anything.” To make the job appear important to Johnson, Kennedy assured him he would give him “significant assignments . . . especially in foreign affairs.” For his part, Johnson figured that being majority leader under an activist president like Kennedy would be less palatable than under the more passive Eisenhower, because Kennedy would take credit for legislative success, and would blame Johnson for any failure. Somewhat chillingly, Johnson confided his rationale to journalist Clare Boothe Luce: “I looked it up,” he said. “One out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got.”

  While JFK traveled the country, Jackie stayed at home in Washington, but she kept herself busy. Her instinct was to surround herself with familiar and trusted staff, starting with her secretary Mary Gallagher, formerly employed by Jackie’s mother as well as JFK at his Senate office. (That particular trust would prove to be misplaced, as years later Gallagher would write a spiteful memoir.) For her social secretary, Jackie selected Tish Baldrige, who not only had been three years ahead of her at Miss Porter’s (often called Farmington, for the Connecticut town where the school is located) and Vassar but also was a friend of Jackie’s family.

  Baldrige had acquired discipline in grade school at a convent of the Sacred Heart—lifelong habits of diligence and organization that served her well when she worked as social secretary in the American embassies in Paris and Rome for two demanding women, Clare Boothe Luce and Evangeline Bruce. Having grown to six foot one at age thirteen, Baldrige developed a redoubtable but hearty personality; when a Greek newspaper described her as a “commando from the White House,” she laughed and refused to take offense.

  Baldrige’s father had been a Republican congressman from Omaha, Nebraska, so her rightward political leanings were even stronger than Jackie’s. Baldrige had initially opposed JFK for president, calling him “that floorflusher Kennedy” (she doubtless meant “four-flusher”) and wearing a large “Vixen for Nixon” campaign button. But after Jackie offered the White House job following the Democratic convention, Baldrige was an instant convert. “Jack Kennedy has shown spunk and agility,” she wrote to Clare Luce. “He deserves to win in November.”

  In the weeks following the election, Baldrige fielded a blizzard of handwritten memos (many illustrated with fanciful drawings) and a barrage of phone calls from Jackie, who was immersed in the intricacies of moving, selecting her wardrobe, planning White House cultural events, and mapping out what Baldrige called “a complete makeover of a tired, undistinguished, frumpy White House.” (Jackie would call it a “restoration” based on scholarship because, she said, “redecorate” was “a word I hate.”) “Jackie was suddenly on fire with plans for making her mark as an exceptional first lady,” said Baldrige. “No detail . . . escaped her notice . . . down to the design of her official stationery.”

  As Jackie’s de facto chief of staff, Baldrige embraced her boss’s thinking with characteristic enthusiasm. At a press conference in late November, Baldrige told a gathering of “newshens,” women from the society pages assigned to cover the First Lady, about Jackie’s sweeping ideas for the White House: to highlight American performing artists and create “a showcase for great American art . . . even if it means hanging paintings in front of other paintings.” Baldrige’s remarks provoked a furor in the press, and anger from Jack and Jackie. They forgave her misstep but let her know that press relations were no longer her bailiwick. “I’ve learned lesson number one,” Baldrige confided to Clare Luce. “Keep the mouth SHUT at all times, never be myself, never relax, never joke with anyone about anything concerning the Casa Bianca.”

  The next day, JFK’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, introduced Baldrige to “a very inexperienced, beautiful young woman named Pamela Turnure.” To Baldrige’s amazement, this petite twenty-three-year-old had been designated as Jackie’s press secretary, an innovation for a first lady. As a receptionist in JFK’s Senate office, Turnure had applied for the White House job, telling Jackie she could “learn the duties gradually.” Jackie had selected her instead of a “notably aggressive feminine reporter” recommended by Salinger.

  The choice mystified both campaign aides and reporters, and not only because Pamela Turnure came from outside Jackie’s tight circle. Turnure’s landlady, Florence Kater, had tracked Jack Kennedy’s comings and goings from her Georgetown house when Turnure was working for him. Kater documented his visits with a letter and photograph that she sent to news organizations. She even showed up at a campaign rally carrying a placard bearing the photograph, allegedly of Kennedy leaving Turnure’s house after midnight.

  But reporters at the time usually steered clear of the private lives of public officials, and they were especially protective of the popular Kennedy. “This lady claimed he was having a love affair and it was an immoral thing,” said Look magazine’s Fletcher Knebel. “I never paid any attention to it. I didn’t care if he was screwing her or not. I just assumed he did his share of it.”

  Inside the Kennedy organization the attitude was less blasé. “The rumors were rampant,” said Barbara Gamarekian, an aide to Pierre Salinger. “There was a debate among the Hill staff whether to take her to the convention because of the rumors. The former landlady was trying to get her story out, and we were aware of that.” According to Chuck Spalding’s wife, Betty, Jackie “asked me if I knew [Jack] was having an affair with Pamela Turnure. I said I didn’t know, and even if I did, I wouldn’t tell her.” Whatever Jackie knew, her manner toward Turnure was invariably affectionate, akin perhaps to the eighteenth-century attitudes she so admired; after all, one of her “heroines,” according to Lee Radziwill, was Louise de la Vallière, a mistress of Louis XIV.

  Jackie evidently saw that Turnure could be useful to her. In an authorized biography of Jackie’s White House years published in 1967, Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer described the cool and
laconic Turnure as a “small, fine-boned brunette with the palest complexion and blue-green eyes which gazed unswervingly when she spoke” and who “seemed to understate her prettiness deliberately. Her poise was remarkable: She never raised her voice and remained unruffled under the most exasperating circumstances.” Friends and associates couldn’t help noticing a physical resemblance to Jackie; Mary Gallagher said Turnure “could almost be taken for Jackie’s double.”

  She was also nearly as well bred: she was the daughter of the publisher of Harper’s Bazaar, and a graduate of the Bolton School in Westport, Connecticut, and Mount Vernon Junior College in Washington. She was only nineteen, working as a receptionist at the Belgian Embassy, when she met JFK at the wedding of Jackie’s stepsister Nina Auchincloss. In her job in JFK’s office, Turnure “proved efficient as well as tactful,” wrote Thayer. Equally important, according to Turnure’s mother, Louise Drake, “Pam was always very quiet. It was hard to get much out of her.”

  Jack and Jackie spent Thanksgiving with Bill Walton in Washington. In the morning they went for a walk near Middleburg, Virginia, where Walton was completing negotiations on an estate for the First Couple to rent as a weekend escape. That afternoon the threesome had dinner that included caviar and champagne. Jackie’s due date was still three weeks away, and JFK felt comfortable going to Palm Beach that night. While he was airborne, Jackie began to hemorrhage “because of all the excitement,” she said later. The ambulance driver found her lying in bed, wearing thick white wool socks, a pink nightgown, and overcoat. “She was smiling and looked like a baby doll,” he said. But her anxiety showed when she asked the doctor if she would lose her child.