Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  To the press and the inhabitants of the West Wing, Jackie was like “a slender butterfly flitting through the corridors of power.” She continued to keep irregular hours, awakening as early as eight or as late as noon, depending on the previous night’s activities. “She was determined to have her own time, and not change her life,” said Baldrige. Jackie had breakfast on a tray (orange juice, toast and honey, coffee with skimmed milk), surveyed the morning papers, and played with John on her bed.

  After pushing John in his pram, she liked to take a brisk walk, play tennis, usually with her favorite Secret Service agent Clint Hill, or jump on the canvas trampoline that she surrounded with seven-foot holly trees for privacy. She avoided the White House pool because the ninety-degree temperature was too warm for her taste, although she did train with light weights in the adjacent fitness room. Long before people understood the effect of endorphins, she believed that she would be more alert if she exercised before settling down to work. At first she had toyed with the idea of an East Wing office. But like her predecessors, she chose the seclusion of the private quarters, sitting either at her father’s small Empire-style slant-front desk in the living room, or in a green velvet armchair at the large table in the Monroe Room, which she refurbished and renamed the Treaty Room.

  In remarkably short order, Jackie brought a homey elegance to the second floor reminiscent of the rambling Manhattan apartments of her youth—eleven rooms including a newly constructed “President’s Dining Room” and kitchen. (On the third floor were six additional guest bedrooms, two sitting rooms, two solariums, offices, and servants’ rooms, as well as a terrace and greenhouse.) The second floor was dominated by a wide but dark hall running the entire length from east to west that Jackie tried to soften with arrangements of sofas and chairs, and groupings of nineteenth-century American Indian portraits. Still, Arthur Schlesinger groused that “an average Park Avenue tycoon” would regard the apartment as “claustrophobic.”

  On the eastern end were the formal historic rooms—the famous Lincoln Suite, Queen’s Suite, and Treaty Room. At the west end Jackie created a comfortable living room—known as the “West Sitting Hall”—enclosed by a wall with tall wooden sliding doors topped by a fanlight. On the other side of the living room was a large lunette window that overlooked the majestic Executive Office Building, Rose Garden, and West Wing. New built-in bookcases contained Jackie’s favorite volumes (identified by her specially designed Tiffany bookplates), and paintings by Maurice Prendergast, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent complemented period furniture. A door on the north side of the living room led to the new dining room with views of Pennsylvania Avenue and historic Lafayette Square.

  The Kennedys had their own bedroom suites, in keeping with the upper-class practice of the day. Jackie’s was the larger, accessible through a doorway on the living room’s south side. The main entrance to Jack’s, also on the south side, was from the Center Hall, opposite the children’s bedrooms, which faced Pennsylvania Avenue. Jack and Jackie’s bedrooms were connected by a dressing room that Jackie fitted with a stereo system for her husband’s nighttime listening. The immediacy of the First Couple’s most intimate quarters sometimes startled visitors, especially when they were directed to use the President’s bathroom. Many dinner parties wound down in JFK’s bedroom, as he walked around “without the slightest embarrassment,” noted Ben Bradlee, removing his socks and trousers and unbuttoning his shirt as “the last guests [were] bidding one another witty farewells”—not exactly an eighteenth-century levee, but close enough.

  Also on the south side was the high-ceilinged Oval Room that had initially shocked Jackie with its starkness—“like the Lubianka!” she said, referring to an infamous Soviet prison. It soon became her favorite work in progress. She painted it yellow—“a way of letting sunlight in,” she explained to Sue Wilson—and envisioned it as “the heart of the White House,” a sitting room that would exemplify the Louis XVI style loved by Madison and Jefferson, not to mention Jackie. With its commanding views of the South Lawn and Washington Monument, this was the room where the Kennedys would entertain friends and state visitors alike.

  Jackie usually spent several hours in the late morning ploughing through folders neatly stacked in a straw basket by Tish Baldrige, writing memos and personal letters in her refined, rounded hand, and dictating instructions on household matters to Mary Gallagher. (While she left an extensive epistolary trail of her tenure as First Lady, she never kept a journal: “I want to live my life, not record it.”) She had a light lunch of broth and a sandwich, often with her husband, and rested after her maid Providencia Paredes had changed the sheets from the previous night.

  Since her teen years, Jackie had followed a meticulous beauty regimen that included sprinkling cologne on her hairbrush (“fifty to one hundred strokes . . . every night”), glistening her eyelashes with a pinch of skin cream, and applying powder before and after lipstick (“should stay on through . . . corn on the cob”). Jackie was disciplined about her weight—120 pounds, according to Oleg Cassini. “She was very slim, and had great muscle tone,” he recalled. “She had no extra fat.” Jackie watched the scale “with the rigor of a diamond merchant counting his carats,” said Tish Baldrige. If Jackie added just two pounds, she would fast for a day, then confine herself to a diet of fruit while increasing her exercise time with more hours on the tennis court or trampoline.

  Jackie was, however, hopelessly addicted to the filtered L&Ms that she kept in a barrel-shaped gold cigarette case containing a small lighter—a gift from her brother-in-law Stas Radziwill. “She was always smoking, ever since I can remember,” said Vivian Crespi, “even if she would take a few puffs and put it down, she sort of needed it. She smoked all through her pregnancies, but we didn’t know at the time that it was harmful.” (The landmark surgeon general’s report on smoking and health would not be released until the autumn of 1963.) Few outside the Kennedy circle were aware of her habit—which averaged nearly a pack a day—a badge of sophistication since Farmington. When Jackie was agitated, Mary Gallagher observed that “newly lit cigarettes were being stubbed out in the ashtray on her desk, one after the other.” On the campaign trail, Larry O’Brien used to hold her cigarettes so that she could “take furtive puffs from time to time.”

  Afternoons for Jackie were given over to reading, painting watercolors on an easel in a corner of her bedroom, or to outings with the children in her blue Pontiac station wagon. Camouflaged by a head scarf and an old trench coat over her jeans and sweater, she moved about the city unrecognized, taking her children to the circus or theater, with several Secret Service agents unobtrusively nearby. Even at Caroline’s ballet recitals, “she had a way of rendering herself anonymous,” recalled Anne Truitt.

  Jackie rarely held a staff meeting and was a stranger in the East Wing, choosing instead to drop in on the ground-floor Curator’s Office, the hub of the restoration work that absorbed most of her mental energy and gave her the most pleasure. “For others she insisted upon order,” said J. B. West. “For herself she preferred spontaneity.” West discovered early that Jackie would take advice, but only when she sought it. “She strongly resisted being pushed,” he said. “The trick was to read her correctly . . . not to oppose her . . . sometimes she was so subtle she needed a translator.” Lady Bird Johnson, an astute judge of character, “never saw her dealing with an opponent, but I sensed she could be difficult if faced with one. ‘My antenna’ just felt it so to speak.”

  With her irrepressible enthusiasm, Tish Baldrige never accepted Jackie’s self-imposed limits, constantly pressuring the First Lady to do more until, as arts adviser August Heckscher observed, she would have her “ears pinned back” by Jackie. Establishment Washington was sometimes dismayed by Jackie’s unconventional ways. Ymelda Dixon, a Washington Star society columnist and daughter of a veteran congressman, recalled that Jackie mostly avoided the annual lunches for wives and daughters of senators and congressmen. “The President came. He cared,” s
he said. “But Jackie got away with it.”

  Even when Jackie made a commitment, she could easily duck out, confident that Baldrige would find an instant substitute from a group of women “on call” that included Janet Auchincloss, Rose Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, and JFK’s sisters. Lady Bird cheerfully assumed the last-minute duty more than anyone, earning the nickname “Saint Bird” among Jackie’s staffers. Jackie’s “little-girl quality made you want to help her—to be ‘on her side,’” said Lady Bird. Rose Kennedy frequently volunteered to fill the breach, although Jackie bristled whenever Rose tried “to reinvent the White House social agenda,” recalled Baldrige.

  Barbara Gamarekian of the press office remembered the times when Jackie canceled “meet and greets” with visitors. Once when Ethel Kennedy was filling in, Gamarekian heard that Jackie was playing tennis on the White House court. “I was lying through my teeth, saying Jackie wasn’t feeling well,” recalled Gamarekian. “I had visions of someone walking along the Ellipse, where the tennis court was visible, visions of being caught in a lie, and I resented being put in that position if I had said she was indisposed.” From time to time Jackie got caught “playing hooky”—as she did to Kennedy’s embarrassment when he told June Havoc and Helen Hayes that she was ill, only to have the newspapers disclose that Jackie had been riding in Virginia with the tony Orange County hunt instead.

  For all of Jackie’s surface serenity, at age thirty-one she periodically felt swamped. “She gets pressured very easily,” JFK told Baldrige. “I want Jackie to feel protected, not persecuted.” Janet Auchincloss pointed to Jackie’s “stiffness, even shyness. It’s not that she’s frightened of people, but she’s not outgoing.” Those close to Jackie saw the external evidence of her stress: the nails that she would pick and gnaw, the circles under her eyes after a sleepless night. “She would get terribly down,” said Baldrige. “I would know it because she would swallow repeatedly. That was a sign of great tension. To be queen of the world was overwhelming to her at times. She thought about it a lot and lost her energy.”

  It took vigorous physical activity—the trampoline, riding at full gallop—to invigorate Jackie and relieve her stress. For all her cosmopolitanism, Jackie had depended on the restorative powers of the countryside and seaside since her girlhood roaming on Uncle Hughdie’s estates. She savored the woods, the Potomac River view, and “great steep hills” of Merrywood, as well as “the green fields and summer winds” of Newport’s Hammersmith Farm, where she could “watch the water like bits of broken glass in the sun.” “I love them both, whichever I’m at—just as passionately as I loved the one I left behind,” she told Yusha Auchincloss as a teenager.

  In a ritual that began during her childhood when her mother decamped each summer first to Easthampton, then to Newport, Jackie spent more than three months—two in Hyannis Port followed by nearly six weeks at Hammersmith Farm—away from Washington in the summertime. “It was a Washington pattern,” said Jim Ketchum. “People would pull up stakes at the end of June and return after Labor Day.” Jackie had also become accustomed to staying for as long as a month at a time in Palm Beach at Christmas and Easter. Jack would join her for weekends, and at Newport for his vacation of several weeks.

  With the help of Bill Walton, Jackie secured her own nearby refuge—“the most private place I can think of to balance our life in the White House”—at Glen Ora, the four hundred–acre estate the Kennedys rented from Gladys Tartière in Middleburg, Virginia. (Jackie preferred the verdant hunt country to Camp David, the rustic mountaintop presidential retreat in Maryland.) The early-nineteenth-century six-bedroom home of beige stucco was “comfortable and unpolished,” said Ken Galbraith, “in the trim countryside of the farming and non-farming rich.” Jackie and Sister Parish organized a quick makeover of N Street furnishings as well as those of Mrs. Tartière, with new slipcovers, rugs, and curtains, along with repainting and repapering. The Secret Service fortified the estate with gates and guardhouses, and built a heliport. Jackie belatedly discovered that the property was also a pig farm, so she had to wait until the stalls had been cleared before she could stable her horses, Bit of Irish, a frisky bay gelding, and the more seasoned piebald Rufus.

  Unlike the White House, where tourists peered through fences at the First Family’s activities on the South Lawn, and waiters served the children hamburgers on silver trays, Glen Ora offered the illusion of down-to-earth freedom. “Jackie wanted her kids to have what she grew up with, and to make their lives normal and fun,” said Eve Fout. “She applied effort and ingenuity to that.” Within the spacious boundaries of Glen Ora, Caroline rode her pony, Macaroni, Jackie took the children on picnics in a cave, and in the evenings she enjoyed “giving them baths & putting them to bed—reading—the things I have no chance to do in the W. House.”

  The unencumbered life in Virginia was crucial to Jackie. She could buy a cup of coffee in town without being gawked at, slip over to Bunny Mellon’s for a visit, or grill steaks in the fireplace at the home of Eve Fout and her husband, Paul. “I do not consider myself a part of the Hunt Country life,” she told Eve. “I appreciate the way people there let me alone.”

  Most Thursdays Jackie would leave for Virginia with Caroline and John, not returning to the White House until Monday afternoon. Accompanied by friends, Jack would join the family for Saturday and Sunday. The two weekdays gave Jackie the opportunity to ride her horses, either in solitude on Glen Ora’s trails or at the front of the field with the exclusive Orange County Hunt—a way “to be out with people, but not too much so,” said Eve Fout. Jackie had been spending her weekends riding for many years. As she once explained to Joe Kennedy when Jack was in the Senate, “There isn’t anything to do in Washington but ride . . . and I can go down & hunt & one feels so much better when one exercises.”

  Jackie was passionate about horses and foxhunting, which appealed to her romantic spirit and allowed her to lose herself in the excitement of galloping behind baying hounds in pursuit of their elusive quarry. “There is a kind of religious cultish thing about the world of horses,” said Oleg Cassini. “It’s a world apart. Horse people see life differently, because the animal plays such an important role.” Jackie was a fine and fearless rider, “very, very good,” said Janet Whitehouse, whose husband, Charlie, hunted with Jackie for more than four decades. “She would jump anything and go very fast.” Once when Jack was a senator, Jackie was riding with the Piedmont Hunt when her horse stepped in a hole and threw her to the ground. She landed on her head, was “knocked unconscious . . . swallowed her tongue and was turning blue” when a fellow rider resuscitated her.

  The Fouts were Jackie’s quintessential country friends. Jackie had known Eve since she was a teenager, when Eve attended Miss Hall’s, a girls’ boarding school in western Massachusetts, and they competed on the horse show circuit. Eve grew up in Warrenton, the heart of the Virginia hunt country, and became a well-regarded sporting artist after apprenticeships with several prominent painters of equine portraits. The Chronicle of the Horse, the magazine founded by Bunny Mellon’s first husband, published Eve’s artwork on its covers, which helped launch her career.

  Eve and her husband, Paul, also built a business training horses, including one of Jackie’s. Direct and brusque, Eve jealously guarded Jackie’s privacy, declining even to tell close friends when she was going riding with the First Lady. Paul was somewhat irreverent, teasing Jackie that “she walked like a duck.” Eve sponsored Jackie for the Orange County Hunt during the presidential campaign, which led to criticism in the press. Jackie thanked Eve for “sticking your neck out for me,” and wondered why “the mass of people” couldn’t understand that hunting was not “a cruel sport of the idle rich” but instead tended “to bring out the best in people—love of animals, each other, nature, sport, happiness etc.”

  Jackie did not withdraw from her duties when she was away. “She liked homework; she was on the phone all the time,” said Baldrige. “When she was at Glen Ora she was w
orking,” said Ketchum. “The stuff came back in spades in memos.” Jackie told Eve that spending time by herself in the country “freshened her up to go back to Washington” and “re-enthused” her about her work.

  Jack Kennedy, however, barely tolerated the countryside and what Ben Bradlee described as the “hunt country hangers-on.” JFK liked to visit the Mellons and Adele Astaire Douglas, but otherwise he spent his time taking long naps and playing backgammon with Lem Billings, who came along most weekends to keep him company while Jackie was riding. The two old friends would often escape boredom by driving around the countryside to look at old houses and check out where various people lived.

  Kennedy welcomed having a place to entertain friends away from the White House, but he far preferred to sit with them on the fantail of the ninety-two-foot presidential yacht, Honey Fitz, in Nantucket Sound. “The whole reason for Glen Ora was to be nice to Jackie,” said Paul Fout. “He agreed to have the house here to appease her. He had no interest in foxhunting.” At the beginning, Jackie tried to entice her husband to ride, and outfitted him with a jacket and jodhpurs from Miller Clothing in New York. “He looked like Ichabod Crane with his legs flying,” recalled Ben Bradlee. “I think he liked the idea of it, but didn’t know what he was doing.” Amazingly, Kennedy sustained no injury, and his bad back gave him an excuse to stop.

  JFK’s life necessarily revolved around the vast responsibilities of his office, but less obviously his schedule included unusual accommodations to his myriad ailments. His principal physicians, Janet Travell and Admiral George Burkley, worked in a room on the ground floor, and he had an array of specialists in regular contact by telephone that included an allergist, endocrinologist (for his Addison’s disease), gastroenterologist (for colitis), urologist (for urinary tract infections resulting from venereal disease), and orthopedist (for his degenerative spine).