Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Predictably, Beaton took caustic note of Jackie’s “affected” manner, as well as her “huge baseball-player shoulders and haunches, big boyish hands and feet,” “somewhat negroid appearance,” and “suspicion of a moustache.” He did concede the beauty of her “receptive eyes,” capable of “looking roguish or sad,” and the “slight hesitancy” of her speech that made her appear “modest and humble.” He also noted that Jackie criticized the queen’s dress from the previous evening and her “flat hair style.” The First Lady “seemed to have no fear of criticism. She enjoys so many aspects of her job, and takes for granted the more onerous onslaughts of the press.”

  The next morning Jackie and Lee took off for eight days in Greece as the guests of Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis. Since the Greek leader lived in a small apartment in Athens, he asked his friend Marcos Nomikos, a shipping tycoon, to lend Jackie and Lee his seaside villa at Kavouri, as well as his 125-foot yacht, the North Wind, for a four-day cruise of the Greek islands. The sisters were joined by Stas and several friends: John Mowinckel, an official from the American Embassy in Paris, and his wife, Letizia (“Jackie invited us and said ‘Don’t tell anybody,’” recalled Letizia. “Secrecy was part of her nature”), as well as extra man Arkady Gerney, Jackie’s friend from Paris days. Although the trip was private, Tish Baldrige was on hand to help out, getting the villa ready and organizing itineraries and cultural events.

  All appeared serene as Jackie and Lee toured ancient ruins, sunbathed, and swam. Behind the scenes, however, they had reverted to the wisecracking “Jacks” and “Pekes” who had roared around Europe exactly a decade earlier, but now they were turning on Baldrige and arbitrarily changing schedules. “I could only describe it as mean-spiritedness I had not seen before,” Baldrige recalled. “There was whispering behind my back, and conspiratorial giggling.” Baldrige compounded the problem by complaining to the President, mainly because she had security concerns, putting her in the position of “chief tattler.”

  The sisters’ behavior was the first overt sign of Jackie’s growing resentment of Baldrige’s strong-willed management of the First Lady’s office. “Jackie was a very complex person,” said Letizia. “She was not manipulative, but she had her own way, her own likes and dislikes. . . . She didn’t like to be told what to do, and Tish would say, ‘You must do that,’ which got on Jackie’s nerves.” In Letizia’s view, “There was already a campaign against Tish, and Lee didn’t help. She was blowing on the fire. . . . She had a lot to do with Jackie’s behavior toward Tish.” Baldrige preferred to excuse Jackie’s actions as “a momentary lapse of selfishness going back to her school days of doing what she wanted, being independent, and stamping her foot.”

  As Jackie’s trip wound down, her activities began drawing potentially embarrassing headlines such as “First Lady Dances Till 1.” After dinner one evening, she insisted—against the wishes of the Secret Service—on visiting a nightclub, where she danced the Kalamatianos with a group of Greeks. She was also spotted whizzing through the countryside “in a Mercedes with young Crown Prince Constantine at the wheel.”

  These reports presented an unfortunate juxtaposition with her husband’s situation. Within days of his return to Washington, the press had been filled with reports on his badly injured back. Having watched his agony in Paris, Vienna, and London, Jackie was fully aware of his condition, and during her vacation she kept in touch with the White House. “She was on the phone every night, in long conversations with Jack,” said Letizia Mowinckel.

  Yet Jackie declined to cut her vacation short, prompting Pierre Salinger to fib twice to the press, first saying she had gone to Greece without knowing of JFK’s injury, then asserting that in London he mentioned “in passing” his back pain. According to Salinger, she only realized the severity when she read about it in the newspapers. She had offered to return home, Salinger said, but JFK had recommended she remain on holiday.

  Kennedy’s back problems had deteriorated once he reached the White House, and he was forced to use crutches all the time, even to greet visiting dignitaries. When his doctors ordered him to Palm Beach for “complete rest” for four days during the second week of June, Salinger disclosed the tree-planting incident in Canada. The crutches were necessary, Salinger explained, “to rest the strained muscle.” Kennedy needed to soak in the Wrightsmans’ hot saltwater pool, so he returned to their estate, which by then had been closed for the season and looked rather eerie with its furniture protected by dustcovers.

  Kennedy was accompanied by Chuck Spalding as well as Janet Travell, White House chef René Verdon, and staff members including Priscilla Wear and Jill Cowan. Travell “kept a sharp vigil over her patient,” who slept nearly twelve hours, relaxed in his pajamas, and swam in the rain. He also consulted with an orthopedist flown in from New York.

  One evening, Kennedy invited Hugh Sidey to join him for dinner on the terrace with Spalding, Wear, and Cowan—“a weird night,” by Sidey’s recollection. Kennedy wore white flannels and despite his infirmity was full of jokes. As Frank Sinatra tunes played in the background, Kennedy and his guests sipped daiquiris and ate “fish in the bag” prepared by Verdon. Kennedy told a wild tale about a small nuclear bomb that had been smuggled piecemeal into the attic of the Soviet Embassy on Sixteenth Street—only blocks away from the White House. Sidey dismissed the story as improbable and declined to pursue it. (Years later, he would learn that the Defense Intelligence Agency had for two decades believed such a bomb existed.)

  Kennedy’s willingness to regale Sidey that way showed his confidence that the journalist would keep the President’s remarks—as well as his behavior—“off the record.” As dinner ended, Sidey offered Fiddle and Faddle a ride back to their quarters at the Palm Beach Towers, where the press and White House staff usually stayed. Wear and Cowan assured Sidey they had their own car. As the awkwardness grew, they rose to leave with Sidey. But once in their car, they said it wouldn’t start, explaining they had to return to the house to call for help. “I said to myself, ‘Hugh, you stupid guy,’ as they went back in,” recalled Sidey. “That was as close as I got. I think it was a therapy session of sorts. It was reckless of him, but he called it right. He knew I wasn’t going to write about it.”

  The President’s journey home from Florida couldn’t have been more dramatic. Unable to climb the steps to his airplane, he resorted to a cherry picker to lift him aboard. When he arrived at the White House, he hobbled across the South Lawn on crutches—a sight that was “just a bit upsetting . . . to a good many Americans,” Newsweek observed. He had to be helped into his rocking chair, and he conducted meetings from his bed and even his bathroom. Ken Galbraith had to sit on a stool while Kennedy soaked in the tub, turning on the hot water with his foot. “I think he is suffering a good deal from his back,” Galbraith noted in his journal. “Certainly it is more serious than he admits or wants to admit.”

  Harold Macmillan was so concerned that he asked a British physician, Sir John Richardson, to travel to Washington and investigate Kennedy’s condition. Richardson’s confidential report said that JFK had a “badly formed” back—“one or more vertebrae” that “never grew properly”—which was aggravated by injuries as well as unwise back surgery. “This is why he has rather a stoop and is inclined to hold his arm close to his body,” Richardson concluded. Although Richardson predicted that Kennedy’s immediate strain would subside, his back “would continue to be a source of irritation and intermittent pain.”

  JFK was driven to National Airport just before midnight on Thursday, June 15, to meet Jackie’s arriving flight, but he couldn’t get out of the limousine. Jackie debarked looking “tanned and radiant,” reported Time, while cameras caught her in an unusual public embrace with Jack. According to Newsweek, she “flew into the arms of her husband, waiting for her in his car with his crutches at his side. As photographers clicked away and a crowd of 200 cheered, the First Couple kissed and chatted excitedly until, a trifle embarrassed, the President com
manded his driver: ‘Come on, let’s go.’”

  The next afternoon they went to Glen Ora for the weekend, but Kennedy wasn’t well enough to attend Paul and Bunny Mellon’s debutante party at Oak Spring for their daughter Eliza, so Bill Walton served as Jackie’s escort. Jackie arrived late, looking “very fresh, gay and beautiful,” recalled Ken Galbraith. The all-night dance was held in a specially constructed ballroom designed as a replica of a French village square bustling with a country fair. In a nearby field tents flying flags served as quarters for male guests. Count Basie’s orchestra alternated with a popular dance band, and a fireworks display lit up the night sky. “Someone said an entire vintage year of Dom Pérignon was consumed that night,” wrote Katharine Graham.

  After Paris, Vienna, and London, Jackie was “a huge star,” said Baldrige. “All the men are in love with Jackie,” Stew Alsop wrote to a friend that June. Jackie naturally enjoyed the adulation of the crowds and savored the opportunities for adventure that came with being first lady. “She liked the excitement,” said Martha Bartlett. “She was eager to taste and test everything.” As Jackie had vowed to Joe Alsop a year earlier, she was now fully committed to deploy her influence “for the things I care about.” Susan Mary Alsop observed that Jackie had learned to “use power with tact and reticence.”

  But as Charles de Gaulle perceptively observed, Jackie was able to enhance the Kennedy presidency “without mixing in politics . . . she played the game very intelligently.” Nor did Jackie have any illusions about her own position. “I was an observer (not a participant as [Jack] didn’t wish his wife to be that way),” Jackie later told Harold Macmillan. “He knew I did not miss much—and that I was so aware of all that he was doing. He was proud that I knew.”

  JFK counted on Jackie’s insights into those he did business with—from foreign leaders to garden variety politicians—her “deeper purpose,” in Ken Galbraith’s view. Jackie “would observe, hear and render judgment,” observed Galbraith. “She distinguished sharply between those who were serving him and those who were serving themselves, and especially those who concealed imperfect judgment behind a display of personal importance—the accomplished frauds. Her wise and astringent analysis was especially important to Jack Kennedy.”

  Both Kennedys took away a renewed appreciation for the potency of ritual and historical ambiance that they had witnessed in France. Back in Washington, Jackie applied her new perspective to the state dinner the administration was planning for Pakistani president Mohammad Ayub Khan. Because Ayub had been such a staunch ally, agreeing to send five thousand of his troops to Laos, JFK wanted to treat him to a special celebration.

  Earlier in the year, Charles Cecil Wall, the director of Mount Vernon, had notified Jackie that George Washington’s historic plantation overlooking the Potomac would be “at your disposal” for a “little special entertaining.” He noted, according to Tish Baldrige, that the location was “fabulous in the early evening with the setting sun and the beauty of the river.” Jackie replied to Baldrige, “Remind me if we have a state visit or some VIPs this spring.”

  The arrival of President Ayub on July 11 offered the perfect opportunity for some pageantry at a great American shrine. In less than a month, Jackie, Baldrige, Turnure, and platoons of staff pulled together one of the most memorable dinners in White House history—a “native fête champêtre,” in Time’s words, on the lawn at Mount Vernon. Designers from Tiffany’s and Bonwit Teller decorated the thirty-two-by-fifty-two-foot dining marquee set up near the mansion’s colonnaded terrace—the guy ropes disguised with artificial greenery, the chandeliers hung with garlands of flowers. Bunny Mellon and her resident horticultural expert arranged the centerpieces of seasonal flowers in small vermeil cachepots on yellow tablecloths to match the buttercup yellow interior of the tent. Bunny also lent black wrought-iron garden chairs to accommodate 138 guests. Dinner would be prepared by chef René Verdon at the White House and trucked to army field kitchens on the Mount Vernon grounds.

  The weather was clear as four boats, each with its own trio of musicians, ferried the guests on an hour-long cruise fifteen miles down the Potomac. High officialdom—cabinet members, congressional leaders, senior White House aides—dominated the guest list, which also included the Stephen Smiths and Sargent Shrivers, the Jim Reeds, Franklin D. Roosevelts, Harry du Ponts, and Fifi Fell, a Manhattan beauty often invited by the Kennedys as an extra woman guaranteed to provide lively gossip. (“Not Jack’s type,” Vivian Crespi observed, “more for the salon than the boudoir.”) Also on the guest list was Maurice Tempelsman, who three decades later would be Jackie’s lover and constant companion until her death. At the time, he was a Democratic party supporter with an extensive diamond business in Africa.

  Jackie wore a sleeveless dress with rows of narrow white lace over white organza, accented by a sash and stole in “Veronese green” that Cassini designed for a “romantic antebellum look” to evoke the “pillared elegance” of the setting. All the men sported white dinner jackets except the President and Bobby, who wore more formal black. The guests sipped mint juleps (George Washington’s own recipe) from silver stirrup cups and watched the Continental Fife and Drum Corps in red coats and tricorn hats perform military drills. At the conclusion, the corps fired blanks from their muskets directly at the scrum of sixty reporters across the lawn. When a cameraman waved the white handkerchief of surrender, JFK and President Ayub convulsed with laughter.

  Following the dinner, there was a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra of selections from Mozart and Gershwin. The evening was very much in the tradition of Washington’s own lavish entertaining style. “It was done meticulously to evoke a real aristocrat,” said Tish Baldrige. But the event did draw criticism as being “too fancy and costly for a democratic country.” The most biting comment came from the New York Herald Tribune, which compared the dinner unfavorably to the “grandeur of the French court at Versailles.” Although that was precisely what Jackie had in mind, she bristled nevertheless, and conveyed her displeasure to Tribune reporter David Wise.

  The four-day visit by the “starchy strongman” with the “grey guardsman’s mustache” was judged a success. Beforehand he had expressed concern that the Kennedy administration favored India over Pakistan. Although he failed in his request that the United States end military aid to India, he came away reassured of Pakistan’s value to American interests. He also landed one jab at rival Nehru, telling Kennedy, “People think he’s thinking. Actually, he’s just in a trance.” At the end of his visit, Ayub was so taken with Jackie that he invited her to visit Pakistan.

  Jackie had come back to Washington for the state dinner from the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod, where she had gone with Caroline and John on June 30. With the exception of a few brief trips home in September and October, she would not return to the White House full-time until the third week in October. Jack would join her every weekend, usually arriving on Friday evening and departing Monday morning. Lem Billings was usually on the scene, although he was absent for more than two weeks at the end of the summer, escorting Eunice and Jean around Europe. While in Poland, they dined in an eighteenth-century palace that formerly belonged to the Radziwills, and Billings stole a silver place setting with the family crest that he later presented to a tearfully grateful Stas. JFK was furious about the prank, but predictably forgave Billings.

  Throughout the summer, various friends—Oleg Cassini, the Spaldings, Bill Walton, the Bartletts, and the Roosevelts among others—came to stay at JFK’s cottage in Hyannis. The routine was unvarying—cruises in good weather and bad on Joe Kennedy’s fifty-two-foot cabin cruiser, the Marlin, often with a water-skiing display by Jackie; an early evening trip to the Hyannis Port candy store by the President in his pale blue golf cart with up to eighteen children hanging on—and sometimes toppling off; tennis matches; swimming in the Ambassador’s pool, followed by a baking in the Finnish sauna; dinners with family and friends; movies in the Ambassador’s screening room. (Joe and Ros
e had gone to the Riviera for the summer.)

  During that first summer both Jack and Jackie realized that their cottage was too cramped for a presidential entourage. “He never relaxes in the house,” Jackie told her mother, “just gets out of it on the boat—or else takes a nap.” Jack’s natural habitat was the ocean. “It was curiously moving to see that attractive young couple wearing gay colours, shooting off across the grey-green ‘Boudin’ sea, followed and preceded by armoured coastguard cutters,” observed Noël Coward.

  Jackie found the weekends “almost as exhausting as a week in Washington.” Weekdays were a halcyon time, however, playing with her children, painting as she listened to chamber music (the better to concentrate and avoid distractions), reading, and sunbathing. Jackie even took golf lessons from the pro at the Hyannis Port Club; wearing large sunglasses and a kerchief, she would play only when the course was nearly empty. During one demonstration of her progress, JFK watched patiently as Jackie struggled to hit her ball out of a sand trap on the seventeenth hole.