One symbol of the Kennedy administration’s combination of intellectual liveliness and reflexive conviviality was the launching in November of the Hickory Hill seminars. Inspired by two weeks Bobby and Ethel had spent at the Aspen Institute during the summer of 1961, these sessions reflected Bobby’s earnest devotion to self-improvement. RFK appointed Arthur Schlesinger to organize the seminars, and from the fall through the spring, the group met nearly every month, rotating among the participants’ homes. Regulars included the Dillons, McNamaras, Ormsby Gores, Bundys, Shrivers, Rostows, and Gilpatrics. Three seminars (led by historians David Donald, Arthur Schlesinger Sr., and Isaiah Berlin) took place at the White House. Jackie attended several others, and both the President and First Lady liked to receive texts of the talks that they missed. Debate was spirited, with Ethel and Eunice “particularly undaunted questioners,” said Schlesinger.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth viewed the seminars skeptically at first, dismissing them as “precious,” but she decided they were “all sorts of fun.” Arthur’s wife, Marian, called them “a sort of intellectual quick fix . . . no doubt a harmless exercise, but so Kennedyish . . . the whole of Western thought in eight hour-long seminars, sort of silly.” The meetings turned out to be good publicity for the administration, as Princeton’s David Donald discovered after his discussion at the White House on the Reconstruction period. With considerable perplexity, he reported to Ros Gilpatric that he had fielded a phone call several days later from Washington Star reporter Mary McGrory, “who seemed to have an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the questions the President asked and the comments he made.” Replied Gilpatric, “How word of such affairs gets out remains a mystery to me.”
The Kennedy insiders were also diehard club men who believed in the informal exchange of information while dining at a long table, followed by brandy and cigars in large leather chairs near the hearth of a capacious sitting room. The hub of these gentlemanly transactions was the Metropolitan Club, only blocks from the White House, and, to a lesser extent, the Cosmos Club on Embassy Row. Like New York, Boston, and other big cities, Washington had exclusive women’s clubs, but the all-male bastions were the centers of power—and of controversy as well. Not only did they exclude women, they also shunned blacks and other ethnic minorities.
Such restrictive policies created a brouhaha in September when Republican George Lodge, the son of Henry Cabot Lodge, was censured by the board of the Metropolitan Club for bringing a black man to lunch. Lodge’s guest was George Weaver, an assistant secretary of labor in the Kennedy administration. Lodge resigned in protest, and Bobby Kennedy swiftly followed suit, releasing his resignation letter to the press. “It is inconceivable to me,” RFK wrote, that privileges in the Metropolitan Club “would be denied to anyone merely because of his race.”
Charley Bartlett also resigned, as did Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Burke Marshall and Ambassador to Denmark Bill Blair. But a more significant number of prominent men kept their memberships: Adlai Stevenson, Hugh Auchincloss, Stuart Symington, Dean Acheson, Claiborne Pell, Arthur Krock, Rowland Evans, and Joe Alsop among them. Mac Bundy actually joined the Metropolitan Club right after the furor broke, even as his brother Bill, a State Department official, left the club. Although the President declined to speak publicly about the matter, it was assumed that Bobby represented his viewpoint. According to the New York Times, JFK left the decision “up to the consciences of his aides.” Privately, JFK liked to bait his national security adviser about his membership, which discomfited Bundy more than he admitted.
What Bundy didn’t know was that JFK maintained his own membership in the Brook, New York’s most exclusive men’s club, which at the time had no black members. Through his friendship with Earl E.T. Smith, Kennedy had joined in 1957, when he had been a senator for four years. (JFK was rankled, he once told Red Fay, that it was “impossible for an Irish Catholic to get into the Somerset Club in Boston”—that city’s equivalent of the Brook.)
Soon after he became a member of the Brook, he took Evan Thomas, an editor at Harper & Row, to lunch. “This is the first and probably the last time I will have visited this club,” Kennedy said, feigning embarrassment. But Kennedy visited whenever he could and even held a strategy session there during the presidential campaign. In his compartmentalized fashion, he was able to serenely enjoy the comforts of one men’s club while chiding his top aide about membership in another. Bundy would eventually resign from the Metropolitan Club in the fall of 1963, prodded by Kennedy’s “persistent and not always gentle needling.” “I always felt sorry for Mac Bundy,” said Charley Bartlett, recalling that after Kennedy’s assassination, Bundy said repeatedly, “I never had a chance to tell the President.” At the time of his death, Kennedy was still a member of the Brook.
After his setbacks in domestic and foreign policy, Kennedy seemed poised to begin 1962 on an upbeat note. He and Jackie made a quick goodwill tour (“more a schmalzfest than a bold adventure,” cracked Time) to Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Venezuela, drawing huge crowds chanting “Viva Miss America” to Jackie. In two days of talks in Bermuda before Christmas, Kennedy pressed Harold Macmillan for permission to use British territory in the Pacific for atmospheric nuclear tests. While Kennedy was “moved” by Macmillan’s passion for disarmament, he insisted on the tests, and the prime minister finally agreed to present the proposal to his cabinet.
The two leaders enjoyed a deep mutual trust, abetted by David Gore, who felt that “it was almost like a family discussion when we all met together.” Kennedy showed Khrushchev’s secret correspondence to Macmillan and confided his irritation with de Gaulle. Macmillan observed that Kennedy was more efficient on specific problems while “on the wider issues he seems rather lost.” The British leader also detected Kennedy’s sensitivity—“very easily pleased, and very easily offended. . . . He likes attention.”
Kennedy evidently felt so at ease with his British counterpart that he confided his sexual proclivities—already revealed to Macmillan by Jock Whitney two years earlier. “I wonder how it is with you, Harold?” Kennedy said. “If I don’t have a woman for three days I get a terrible headache”—an assertion Nancy Mitford had heard from friends in Venice five months earlier and passed along to her sister the Duchess of Devonshire. According to biographer Alistair Horne, to whom Macmillan disclosed this conversation with Kennedy three decades later, “the sixty-seven-year-old monogamous Prime Minister was nonplussed.” Macmillan was hardly naÏve, however, as he had for years endured his wife Dorothy’s affair with fellow Tory member of Parliament Robert Boothby.
Before arriving in Bermuda, Kennedy had hurt his back again. Macmillan duly observed JFK’s discomfort and restlessness that made it “difficult to sit in the same position for any length of time” or to “pick up a book or paper off the floor.” Oddly enough, only four days later, after a physical exam, Kennedy’s doctors declared him in “excellent general health,” his back improved after several months of Dr. Kraus’s exercises.
Overshadowing Kennedy’s trip to Bermuda, and indeed the end of his first year as president, was the sudden and debilitating illness that hit Joe Kennedy. On the way home from South America on December 18, Jack and Jackie had stopped in Palm Beach. Jackie was settling in with the children for an extended Christmas holiday at an eight-bedroom Regency-style home on loan from friends of the senior Kennedys, Colonel Capton Michael Paul, a wealthy former Cossack cavalryman, and his equally rich wife, Josephine, the head of Kidder and Company, the Wall Street brokerage. The Paul estate—four hundred feet of beach, a heated pool, Gothic tapestries, a loggia filled with exotic tropical plants—was a mile south of La Guerida. Jack had planned to touch down only briefly, but after developing a heavy cold and earache during his trip, he decided to spend a day resting in the sunshine before returning to the White House.
Dressed in shorts and a sports shirt, Joe brought Caroline to say goodbye to Jack at the airport the next morning. The Ambassador seemed chipper before head
ing out to play golf with his niece Ann Gargan. As he was teeing off on the eighth hole, Joe felt faint and asked Ann to drive him home, where he briefly encountered Jackie and Caroline on their way to take a swim. Heading to his room to rest, he spoke his last words: “Don’t call any doctors!” When Ann looked in and discovered that he could neither move nor speak, she alerted Rose, who summoned an ambulance. That afternoon, Jack and other family members rushed to Palm Beach.
Joe had suffered a massive stroke, technically an intracranial thrombosis, or blood clot in an artery of the brain. After several days in the balance, he regained consciousness, but there seemed little hope his faculties could be restored. When Richard Cardinal Cushing reported that his old friend had spoken, hospital sources gently explained that Cushing “might have hopefully interpreted” the stream of garbled sounds that were all Joe could manage. Other than “nooo” or “yaaa,” the Ambassador would never talk intelligibly again, although he retained the capacity to understand.
It turned out there had been prior indications that all was not well with Joe. The Kennedy clan had gathered as usual for Thanksgiving at the compound in Hyannis. Lem Billings was with them, and Red Fay and his family were staying at Bobby and Ethel’s. Jack and Jackie opted to eat dinner in their own house (“Jackie probably likes to be alone for a change,” Rose noted in her diary. “She has a crowd so much”), but afterwards everyone gathered at the Ambassador’s for a jolly evening. As the President smoked a cigar, Fay reprised “Hooray for Hollywood,” Teddy danced (with his “big derrière,” Rose observed, “it is funny to see him throw himself around”), and Jackie, wearing a pink Schiaparelli pantsuit, demonstrated the twist “to the jungling-rumbling music of Joan.” But Joe Kennedy was uncharacteristically quiet. He had sustained what Rose called “an attack” ten days earlier. He “complains about a lack of taste in his mouth & feels blah,” Rose recorded.
As Jackie recounted later to Cy Sulzberger, Joe had suffered a series of small strokes, had been given anti-coagulants and “had chucked them away.” He had planned, she said, “to go off suddenly”—perhaps her explanation for Joe’s injunction against calling doctors. Three days after Joe was stricken, the New York Times also cited a family source who said Joe had received several warnings of “the possibility of a stroke” and had refused to take his medication.
If Joe Kennedy was depressed, he gave little evidence. Frank Waldrop, the former editor of the Washington Times-Herald, later said that during a conversation that fall Joe had confessed, “I get awfully blue sometimes.” But less than a week before he fell ill, Joe was engrossed in his latest project in presidential image-making, a film of PT 109, the laudatory new book about Jack’s wartime heroics in the Pacific. Jack Warner, the head of the Warner Brothers studio, had told Joe: “The President will have the final approval of everything . . . not only the person who will portray him but the story itself.” Joe had replied enthusiastically that he would make the necessary arrangements when Jack arrived for his Christmas holiday.
Jack and Jackie visited Joe at the hospital each day. On Christmas Eve they spent an hour, leaving before midnight. They saw him twice on Christmas Day, and received communion in the hospital chapel. Otherwise, life went on pretty much as usual. Jack held meetings with Ted Sorensen, Doug Dillon, and other advisers, Jackie entertained the family for Christmas dinner, and the First Couple took cruises on the Honey Fitz with family and friends (Oleg Cassini, Fifi Fell, Lem Billings). One evening Jack stayed at Earl and Flo Smith’s from 11 p.m. until 1:30 a.m.
The loss of Joe’s everyday presence was an immeasurable blow to the young president. The Ambassador had been a practical-minded sounding board and a boundless source of moral support. Jack could no longer call for advice, as he once did at 3 a.m., and hear his father bark, “Holy cow, fella, call me in the daylight!” Jack continued to check in with his father regularly, dutifully describing events and people as Joe grunted acknowledgment. For Joe Kennedy, long accustomed to power and control, the fate of being trapped speechless inside a largely immobile body was especially cruel. It was an irony not lost on the son who had confronted his own mortality more deeply than most men his age. “Old age is a shipwreck,” Jack Kennedy told Charley Bartlett, with a sad shake of his head.
NINETEEN
Charlie and Jayne Wrightsman treated the Kennedys and a large crowd of their friends to a New Year’s Eve dinner dance with music by Lester Lanin, Krug 1929 champagne, and exquisite food. The tony gathering turned raucous after midnight, as Oleg Cassini and his brother, Ghighi, performed a combination of the twist and the Russian Kazatsky dance, while Bobby, Teddy, Steve Smith, and Peter Lawford played touch football in the living room, breaking glasses and spilling drinks on the Savonnerie carpet. According to Oleg Cassini, “a rare signed pair of antique chairs was demolished,” and local millionaire Stephen “Laddie” Sanford “almost drowned in the reflecting pool, only 35 inches deep, which faced the living room. He was rescued, along with a goldfish that was stuck in his pocket.”
Jack and Jackie prolonged their stay in Palm Beach until the end of the first week of January so that they could continue to spend time visiting the Ambassador. Several days later, Kennedy gave his State of the Union address as Jackie sat in the gallery with Martha Bartlett, Tony Bradlee, and the wives of White House aides. Jackie “rarely took her eyes off him during the more than 45 minutes he spoke,” observed the Washington Post.
Kennedy sought support for Medicare, aid to education, tax cuts, and loosened restrictions on international trade. The President still faced obstacles in Congress, where House Republicans and conservative Democrats maintained their stranglehold. But he did benefit from popularity ratings that had held steady at over 75 percent throughout his first year in office. When JFK was named Time’s “Man of the Year,” the cover article was full of praise for his “wiser, more mature” leadership after a difficult first year. Jackie, Time noted, had “managed to stay very much herself,” refusing to be “falsely humble.” The New York Times offered a different sort of endorsement, declaring that Jackie had “made the world safe for brunettes” and transmitted “upper-crust habits” to the “common woman.”
On Monday, January 15, 1962, Jackie took the unprecedented step of appearing in front of eight television cameras from CBS for nearly seven hours, taping a tour of her White House restoration that had been aided by a hundred donors and lenders. The hour-long program had been in the works since October, when Blair Clark, a network executive who had known JFK since Harvard days, persuaded Jackie to cooperate with CBS as she had earlier with Life.
Months of arrangements had preceded the taping. CBS producer Perry Wolff signed up his friend Franklin J. Schaffner, an up-and-coming Hollywood director (his later hits would include Patton and Papillon), along with debonair correspondent Charles Collingwood, a former Georgetown neighbor of the Kennedys. “I thought a couple of handsome men would help,” said Wolff. Jackie and curator Lorraine Pearce worked out which objects she would highlight and what she would say. Jackie committed all the facts to memory and followed CBS’s “guide script” that allowed her to improvise as she went along.
On the day of the taping, Jackie had only her New York hairdresser, Kenneth Battelle, and Pam Turnure in attendance, and CBS brought a crew of forty. Deferring to “Mr. Schaffner” about where she should walk and turn, Jackie clearly admired the Hollywood director. She made small talk with Collingwood, confiding that Nehru had tried to teach her yoga, “but I had to rest my feet against the wall.” Collingwood was taken with her “shy manner, even a sort of shy way of moving . . . youthful yet quietly assured, though not arrogantly so.” Her demeanor was ladylike but aloof with Collingwood, who made the mistake of overfamiliarity, inviting her to join him and his wife for a drink at their hotel. Jackie gave him what Farmington girls called the PBO—polite brush off.
The First Lady was a disciplined performer. She rehearsed each take, including the questions Collingwood would ask in the conversational format. “Sh
e knew her stuff,” said Wolff. “Nobody was cuing her. No curators were there feeding her. That was how meticulous she was with language. She was a combination of sophistication and ingenuousness, almost childlike, and it was so winning.”
Between takes “she smoked all the time,” said Wolff. “She kept missing the ashtray and flicking the ashes onto the expensive silk covering of the bench she was sitting on. I knew there was tension there.” Despite the strain, she maintained her energy throughout the demands of the day and even had to be reminded to eat lunch. The taping concluded in the second-floor Treaty Room, which Jackie described for the cameras as a “chamber of horrors” because it was a work in progress. She said the room would eventually be a comfortable place for the men “who now sit in the hall with the baby carriages going by them. So they can sit in here and have a conference around this table” while waiting for the President. By prearrangement, Jack joined Jackie at the end to offer his own brief comments. He quickly memorized the prepared script and hurried through it for the cameras.
Jackie was exhausted by the taping, but she nevertheless entertained Joe and Susan Mary Alsop for dinner that evening. At the Kennedys’ request, Wolff screened some of the rushes in the White House theater. Instead of the sculpted bouffant for the cameras, Jackie’s hair hung straight down, and she sipped on a big glass of scotch. After the screening, everyone applauded. “When the lights went up, the President looked at her with adoration and admiration,” Wolff recalled. “There was an emotional connection in that couple, I have no doubt. It was a real look of love. He was so proud of her, and she was so happy that he was proud.” Yet Kennedy was displeased with his own stilted performance, so he asked to do a retake the next day at a more measured pace.
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