Her physician, John Walsh, had announced that she should “curtail her activities for about six months,” which gave her a convenient excuse to duck any event she found tedious. In fact, her time in Palm Beach had hardly been restful, with the endless parade of visitors and the pressures to organize the move into the White House. As Jackie arrived at the three-story Federal-style Kennedy home on N Street near Thirty-fourth in Georgetown, conditions were no better. The place was swarming with visitors, cordoned off by the Secret Service, and surrounded by the press and curious onlookers.
For weeks Jack Kennedy had been working on his inaugural address, a statement of themes and goals to set the tone for his presidency. “I had heard it in bits and pieces many times,” said Jackie. “There were piles of yellow paper covered with his notes all over our bedroom floor.” Jack had solicited ideas from associates such as Schlesinger, Stevenson, and Galbraith (who would concede that the final version was “less daring” though “a lot wiser” than his own). Kennedy had also sought advice from prominent journalists, including Joseph Kraft and the dean of Washington columnists, Walter Lippmann, who suggested that Kennedy refer to the Soviet Union as the “adversary” rather than the “enemy.” The membrane between politics and journalism was so thin in those days that such cozy cooperation was not only routine but a signal of eminence in the newspaper fraternity.
No one had more influence on Kennedy’s words, however, than Ted Sorensen, the stiff and dour Nebraskan who had been his speechwriter and closest adviser since Kennedy’s election to the Senate. The youngest of Kennedy’s aides, only a year older than Jackie, Sorensen had a “square, wintry, bespectacled face” that seemed “carved from ice” and a “smile as spontaneous as a bank vault swinging open.”
Sorensen was aptly described as Kennedy’s “alter ego.” They had the same retentive memories, mental and physical energy, intolerance for small talk, and directness of manner. In his eager self-effacement, Sorensen became a slavish extension of his boss.
After signing on with Senator Kennedy in 1953, Sorensen assumed JFK’s broad Massachusetts inflections and chopping gestures, and abandoned his teetotaling to sip daiquiris and Heinekens, Kennedy’s favorite drinks. Sorensen even developed a painful back, and for years Kennedy gave him advice on the latest remedy. “I could predict Jack Kennedy’s thinking on most issues, and without his speaking of his emotions, I could read them,” Sorensen recalled. Sorensen routinely used “we” instead of “I” to indicate that he and Kennedy thought alike. Yet paradoxically, “never have two people been more intimate and more separate,” said Richard Neustadt, the Columbia University government professor who advised Kennedy on the transition.
Sorensen was neither sophisticated nor privileged. He had never seen a finger bowl until he first visited the Kennedys on Cape Cod, and he had never traveled much beyond the Midwest. His father, the son of Danish immigrants, was a crusading liberal lawyer in Nebraska, and his mother was an outspoken feminist of Russian Jewish descent. Ted was the third child in a family of five that thrived on spirited political discussions and a commitment to public service—perhaps Sorensen’s only common ground with the Kennedy family.
When Sorensen joined Kennedy, he had scant Washington experience, but he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Nebraska and its law school. He also had sterling liberal credentials that seemed useful to Kennedy: membership in Americans for Democratic Action and a history of campaigning for Negro rights when few followed that path. A committed pacifist, Sorensen had registered for military service as a noncombatant, intending to serve as a medic if called.
Sorensen was impressed from the beginning that Kennedy “spoke easily but almost shyly, without the customary verbosity and pomposity” of politicians, and he was drawn to Kennedy’s “insistence on cutting through prevailing bias and myths to the heart of a problem.” Given his own deep reserve, Sorensen understood that Kennedy “disliked shows of emotion, not because he felt lightly but because he felt deeply.” Although Kennedy was cautious in his politics, Sorensen considered his boss a “free man” with a “free mind” open to new ideas and arguments from the left.
Their remarkable intellectual compatibility led to controversy when Kennedy published Profiles in Courage, biographical essays on eight senators who endangered their careers by taking principled stands. Kennedy had many literary helpers, including several historians (among them Schlesinger) and Arthur Krock of the New York Times, who had moonlighted for years as an editor and ghostwriter for his friend Joe Kennedy (and at least once took a $5,000 retainer). They contributed research notes and wrote and edited drafts. Jack Kennedy wrote sections of the book and dictated some hundred pages of notes into a recorder. But it was Sorensen who worked full-time for six months to pull together a narrative that Kennedy polished.
When Profiles was published in 1956, Kennedy was listed as the sole author. In the preface, he gave a credit to Sorensen—“for his invaluable assistance in the assembly and preparation of the material upon which this book is based”—and to others who had helped him. It became a best-seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957, securing for Kennedy a national reputation as the thinking man’s politician. At Joe Kennedy’s request, Arthur Krock had used his considerable influence to “log roll” the Pulitzer Prize board into giving Kennedy the award, displacing their first and second choices, acclaimed biographies of Harlan Stone and Franklin D. Roosevelt. “I worked as hard as I could to get him that prize,” Krock recalled. “Those are the facts. I don’t take any pride in them.”
Later in 1957, columnist Drew Pearson said in a TV interview that the book had been ghosted. The Kennedy family threatened a lawsuit and won a carefully worded retraction saying that JFK took “sole responsibility for [the book’s] concept and contents.” Enough doubt remained that when Robert McNamara first met Kennedy, he asked directly if the President-elect had written Profiles. “I am not sure precisely how he answered,” McNamara said decades later. “But I came away with the firm conclusion that the book represented Kennedy’s thinking, even if many of the words were written by Ted.” McNamara recalled feeling abashed by his bold inquiry once he had a chance to see JFK “write prose of equal quality on many occasions in my presence.”
Kennedy and Sorensen had been inseparable during the campaign as they barnstormed the country. Sorensen was the original workaholic, routinely staying up all night to write speeches. Other speechwriters failed to pass muster. When Schlesinger wrote remarks for Kennedy to deliver to the Liberal Party of New York (the progressive third party founded sixteen years earlier to counter the corruption and special interests of the mainstream Republican and Democratic parties), Sorensen observed that the language was vintage Stevenson and sounded false coming from Kennedy. As Schlesinger dryly observed, Sorensen “tended to resent interlopers.”
Behind Sorensen’s serious demeanor and formidable brain, Jackie detected vulnerability. “Ted is such a little boy in so many ways,” she once said. “The way he almost puffs himself up when he talks to Jack. He hero-worships him.” Sorensen was also deeply ambitious. Although Kennedy called him “indispensable,” Sorensen now had to compete with others for the President-elect’s attention. As JFK pulled his staff together, Sorensen insisted on being called special counsel to mark his seniority and to ensure that his role extended beyond writing. The title had added resonance because it had originated with Roosevelt and had last been used in the Truman administration. At first Kennedy didn’t want any specific titles for his aides, but he finally relented. “Once Ted got the title of Special Counsel, he felt more secure and relaxed,” said Richard Neustadt.
It would have been impossible to parse the inaugural address produced by Kennedy and Sorensen. By 1961 their writing styles were indistinguishable, and much of the rhetoric had been woven into previous speeches. They used the inversion known as chiasmus to produce a distinctive cadence: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” They stressed th
e need for renewal, self-sacrifice, conciliation, strength, and resolve to prevail in a “long twilight struggle” against “the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.” The tone sought to inspire, not polarize, containing nothing to upset the right or the left. The scope was international, with no mention of domestic issues such as unemployment, civil rights, or medical care for the aged. It was also the shortest address since 1944 because, Kennedy told Sorensen, “I don’t want people to think I’m a windbag.”
Kennedy carefully planned the inauguration festivities to evoke history as well as to emphasize the transfer of power to a new generation. Instead of his predecessor’s business suit, Kennedy decided to wear an aristocratic cutaway, pearl gray waistcoat, gray striped trousers, and silk top hat. “He recognized that even as the people would reject a king, their hearts tugged for the symbols of royalty,” said Lem Billings. “For that reason, he deliberately decided to invest his inauguration with pomp and ceremony. He wanted to use the moment to appeal to the imagination, to raise the ceremony to a heightened level of feeling.”
On Thursday, January 19, inauguration eve, a fierce storm imperiled the celebration. Nearly eight inches of snow fell, and stinging winds caused drifting that snarled traffic. Earlier in the day, while Jackie oversaw final preparations for their move, Jack transferred his command center to the other side of Georgetown, into Bill Walton’s red-brick home at the corner of P and Twenty-ninth Streets. “If you stay in this house, I cannot move,” Jackie told JFK. Walton didn’t have much money and “camped out” in the spacious rooms, attended by a faithful housekeeper. Kennedy conducted meetings in Walton’s faded red Victorian parlor furnished with threadbare pieces, while Walton typed up statements for the press on his rickety typewriter.
Kennedy met that day for the second time with President Eisenhower. For his first meeting in early December he had been extensively briefed. A small task force including Adlai Stevenson and two of his associates, John Sharon and George Ball (soon to be under secretary of state), had prepared twenty pages of facts and a page of questions on each subject. Eisenhower, who had been dubious about Kennedy’s readiness, afterwards remarked on Kennedy’s “understanding of the world problems, the depth of his questions, his grasp of the issues and the keenness of his mind.”
The pre-inaugural meeting at the White House lasted two hours. When Kennedy emerged, a reporter asked, “Aren’t you excited?” Kennedy considered for a moment and said, “Interested!” His comment was vintage Kennedy cool, echoing a remark decades earlier during his bachelor days. Chiquita Cárcano, a South American friend, had asked him if he had ever been in love. “Not in love but very, very interested,” he had replied.
By dusk the snow had piled up, and Kennedy called “Billy Boy” Walton to offer him a lift to the inaugural concert at Constitution Hall and the inaugural gala at the National Guard Armory. Jackie wore an elegant Cassini-designed white silk gown befitting a debutante; not only was white her favorite color, she considered it the “most ceremonial.” Jackie once wrote that she dreamed of being “a sort of Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century, watching everything from a chair hanging in space.” She applied that theatrical sensibility to her first major appearance and each one that followed. Jackie had a profound sense of occasion, and she wanted to be noticed, but not in a vulgar way. White stood in brilliant contrast with the colorful gowns in the crowd on a winter night. She wore an emerald necklace, and a fabric rosette called a cockade accented her waist, a small tribute to the Gallic eighteenth century.
As the limousine carrying Jack, Jackie, and Walton crunched along deserted streets, “the night journey was eerie and exciting to the three isolated inside the heated car. During the ride they looked out the blurred windows and scarcely spoke. The street lights shone mistily on deep white drifts.” Emergency road crews held up pink flares and torches, and Jack said to Walton, “Turn on the lights so they can see Jackie.”
The gala, a fundraiser for the Democratic party, was an extravaganza produced by Frank Sinatra and Kennedy’s brother-in-law, the English actor Peter Lawford. The performances ranged from Sir Laurence Olivier and Mahalia Jackson to Eleanor Roosevelt reading the words of Abraham Lincoln. The women ushers reflected the regal mood with their rhinestone crowns. Jackie returned home after the performance, while JFK and Walton went downtown to a party for three hundred at Paul Young’s Restaurant given by Joe Kennedy. It was 3:48 a.m. when the President-elect finally returned to Georgetown.
Celebrities added dazzle to the new administration. Actresses such as Angie Dickinson had campaigned with Citizens for Kennedy along with baseball star Stan Musial, writer James Michener, and Arthur Schlesinger, who became Dickinson’s lifelong friend. JFK had a direct link to Hollywood through Lawford, the husband of Patricia Kennedy.
Six years earlier, when Pat and Peter were both skimming thirty, they had married after a five-month courtship. Pat was tall and athletic, with auburn hair and lovely blue eyes. Like her sisters she had received a proper Catholic education in Sacred Heart convent schools, and had graduated from Rosemont College, a Catholic school in suburban Philadelphia.
The son of Sir Sydney and Lady Lawford, Peter had learned early to live by his wits and capitalize on his good looks after his family went broke during World War II and emigrated to Palm Beach. When he and Pat married, he had several successful films to his credit. The Kennedys were captivated by his glamorous connections, although his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver saw that he was a lightweight: “Peter was good fun, but he was not what you would call a power.” The Ambassador was even more dubious, telling Oleg Cassini that English actors were “the worst kind.”
Lawford compensated for his modest talent with an obsequious personality. He used his Kennedy connections to join forces with Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Dean Martin in the finger-snapping Rat Pack that had its apotheosis in the famous crime-caper film Ocean’s Eleven. By the time of the inauguration, the Lawfords had three children, and Pat was pregnant for the fourth time. Pat and Peter seemed like a golden couple, but their marriage was crumbling, and both had sought solace in alcohol and extramarital affairs.
Jack Kennedy visited their Spanish-style 10,000-square-foot Santa Monica beachfront home whenever he passed through on the campaign. Their parties invariably featured an array of film stars for JFK’s amusement. Kennedy’s fascination with Hollywood originated with his father’s stint as a movie producer during the twenties and thirties. The Kennedy family grew up watching first-run movies in the basement screening room at Hyannis Port, and they knew about the Ambassador’s “friendship” with Gloria Swanson, who swept into the Compound in her Rolls driven by a chauffeur in wine-colored livery with puttees. After the war, Jack spent time on the West Coast, where he befriended a number of actors and actresses, including Lawford.
“Why did [Gary] Cooper draw a crowd?” Kennedy would ask his friend Chuck Spalding, then a Hollywood screenwriter. JFK “was always interested in seeing whether he had it—the magnetism—or didn’t have it.” Before walking into a party, Kennedy would tell Inga Arvad, “OK now it’s time to turn on the BP—Big Personality,” and she would watch “that great big grin . . . knock everybody out.” As Gore Vidal once observed, Kennedy “enjoyed the game of pleasing others, which is the actor’s art.”
SEVEN
“We went to the ceremony on a snow plow,” recalled Diana Vreeland of the sparkling Kennedy inaugural. “It was so cold that day . . . and the snow was that thick—there wasn’t a branch that wasn’t entirely encrusted with ice. And of course there wasn’t a sound. The monuments of Washington stood out in this white white atmosphere. But what I remember best is the blue of the sky . . . Washington that day was so clean, and the dome of the Capitol stood out against this blue sky—blue like a china blue. I’ll never forget that blue—or that day.”
Bill Walton was on hand to watch proudly as the “shining young couple” left Georgetown for the White House. Jackie wore another Cassini des
ign, a wool coat and pillbox hat perched on the back of her head. The color was “greige,” a soft blend of gray and beige, with a circle of sable at the neck. She carried a matching sable muff that Diana Vreeland had suggested because “I thought she was going to freeze to death. But I also think muffs are romantic because they have to do with history.”
As with the evening before, Jackie had chosen her understated costume for dramatic effect, to stand out from the women around her, all of whom, the Washington Post reported, “were coated in mink.” “I just didn’t want to wear fur,” Jackie said. “Perhaps because women huddling on the bleachers always looked like rows of fur bearing animals.” In the 22-degree chill, JFK removed his overcoat before standing to take the oath of office, a strong message of youthful fitness—although he was protected by thermal underwear beneath his formal clothing. He projected commanding serenity as well, despite understandable jitters. Before he walked onto the platform in front of the Capitol’s East Front, Nancy Dickerson watched as “he whistled and rocked back and forth on his feet.”
Kennedy’s address was preceded by an innovative contribution by eighty-six-year-old Robert Frost. The poet had agreed to read his famous verse “The Gift Outright,” and had composed a special preface praising JFK for “summoning artists to participate in the august occasions of the state.” Inviting Frost was the idea of Arizona congressman Stewart Udall, JFK’s choice for secretary of the interior. Frost and Udall were friends, and when Kennedy met with Udall about his post in the administration, Udall reminded the President-elect that Frost had been an outspoken supporter during the campaign. Udall thought Frost could take part by preparing “a poet’s benediction.” Kennedy considered for a moment and shrewdly replied, “It’s a good idea, but we don’t want to be like Lincoln at Gettysburg. He is a master of words. We don’t want him to steal the show. Let him read a poem.”
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