Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Jackie and Lee arrived in New Delhi on Monday, March 12, 1962. During what Jackie called the “most magic two weeks in my life,” they made a few dutiful visits to such locales as a hospital and a home for “maladjusted and vagrant boys.” The focus was far more on beautiful sights—the Taj Mahal by moonlight, a marvel, Jackie said, of “mass and symmetry”; the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore; the dramatic Khyber Pass, where Jackie wore Ayub Khan’s Astrakhan hat at a rakish angle and mused about Alexander of Macedon. The sisters stayed in a 900-room palace and partied with maharajahs and maharanis. One night in Jaipur, Jackie was up until 3 a.m. after a post-midnight tour of the city’s floodlit pink buildings. In New Delhi, Jackie expertly completed a riding and jumping course with the mounted bodyguards of the Indian president. In Pakistan, Ayub gave her a bay gelding named Sardar, and Jackie excitedly took her new mount through three “fantastic gaits.”

  After some initial unease, Jackie grew increasingly relaxed. She unabashedly smoked as she settled into her box at Pakistan’s national horse show. When Bashir Ahmed, the famous camel driver befriended by LBJ, offered her a ride, she merrily dragooned Lee into joining her and announced that a camel “makes an elephant feel like a jet plane.” “Both the First Lady and her sister were as natural and unaffected as they were as very young girls before political lightning changed their lives,” wrote Molly Thayer.

  Nehru was so bewitched that he insisted Jackie and Lee vacate the guest house that the Galbraiths had carefully prepared and move into his residence. He showed them a snake charmer and treated them to sumptuous feasts with elaborately costumed dancers. Each day in New Delhi, Jackie and Lee walked for an hour or so with Nehru in his garden. “We never talked of serious things,” Jackie told Joan Braden. “I guess because Jack has always told me the one thing a busy man doesn’t want to talk about at the end of the day is whether the Geneva Conference will be successful or what settlement could be made in Kashmir or anything like that.” Instead, “they talked about what they were reading, about people, and about some of the insanities of foreign policy,” Galbraith recalled. “Nehru was a lonesome man who loved the company of beautiful and intelligent women.”

  Jackie also clicked with Ayub, a military man—“magnificent” in his uniform, she said—educated in England like Nehru. Harold Macmillan considered Ayub a man of “fine character . . . easy to talk to.” Jackie thought the Pakistani president was “like Jack—tough and brave and wants things done in a hurry.”

  Jackie and Lee created a tableau of splendid outfits, mostly designed by Cassini, in sherbet colors that were intended to complement their surroundings. “There will be a lot of sun, a lot of light,” she had said to Oleg, stressing that she wished to avoid anything “subdued.” In the evenings she often wore what Galbraith called “queenly white.” Her lavender dress in Benares, the ambassador noted, conformed to her “excellent sense of theater” and “could be picked out at any range up to five miles.” The sisters brought sixty-four pieces of luggage, and in the first six days Jackie wore twenty different ensembles. During one shopping expedition, Jackie dropped nearly $600 (the equivalent of $3,600 today) in five minutes on purses embroidered with rubies and emeralds as well as yards of silk brocade. She was mildly irked at Ken Galbraith for misleading her into thinking she was paying far less. “Only an economist could make such a mistake,” she told Joan Braden.

  Jackie and the Galbraiths got along well, although she confessed to Jack in a letter that the ambassador turned out to be a publicity hound. “He makes Tish look reticent,” she wrote. “He is always darting out to give [the press] briefings.” Galbraith noted in his journal that the President “told me that the care and management of Mrs. Kennedy involved a good deal of attention, and he is quite right.”

  As with the previous year in Greece, Jackie and Tish Baldrige were quietly at odds. Baldrige had knocked herself out with logistics and had avoided burdening Jackie with details. (One hundred pages of typed notes included diagrams showing where Jackie would stand.) At Baldrige’s suggestion, the Galbraiths had even imported provisions from Beirut so that their Indian chef could prepare grilled cheese for the First Lady that would be “exactly like a drugstore sandwich at home.”

  Above all, Baldrige had adapted to the First Lady’s shifting plans. Jackie wouldn’t accept early morning appointments, and she insisted on time each afternoon for a nap. “One must be adamant,” Jackie later told a friend, “or they will run you into the ground.” “It was not easy for me,” Baldrige recalled. “It was the same behavior again. It was Lee’s fault, but it was also Jackie’s fault. She should have been more sensitive to the role I was playing.” Midway through the trip, Baldrige fell ill and was flown to London to recuperate with the Bruces.

  Before Jackie’s departure, Galbraith had been concerned about her exhaustion, and a “slightly alarming report on her health” from a local doctor. But stopping in London for a few days en route home, Jackie bounced back at a party given by Lee and Stas with Oleg Cassini, Benno Graziani and his wife Nicole, Cecil Beaton, and the actress Moira Shearer. They consumed large quantities of caviar and vodka, danced the twist, and learned “le hully gully” from Graziani and Cassini. The two friends draped themselves in oversized Indian necklaces, Graziani perched a pot on his head, and Cassini fashioned a towel into a turban to do an impression of a Moghul potentate—jackanape routines they would repeat several weeks later for the President at a White House dinner party attended by the French ambassador.

  Jackie’s trip had no specific political impact, but Galbraith told Kennedy that she “took all the bitterness out of our relations with India.” Nehru spoke of “the charm of her personality” that deepened the “psychological pull” between the two nations. Even Indira Gandhi melted. On a visit to New York afterwards, she said “everyone loved” Jackie, and Indira’s mood brightened that much more when JFK met with her privately in the Oval Office. True to form, Kennedy couldn’t resist making political sport with Jackie’s activities. On hearing that she had taken an elephant ride in India, he told the press, “She gave him sugar and nuts, but, of course, the elephant wasn’t satisfied.”

  TWENTY

  While Jackie was overseas, her husband enjoyed his tomcat freedom. The day after he bade her goodbye on March 8, he headed off for a Miami weekend with two of his partners in prowling, George Smathers and Bill Thompson. The following week Jack spent an evening in the White House with Mary Meyer, meeting her only hours after Caroline and John returned from a stay with their grandparents in Palm Beach.

  On Thursday, March 22, precisely two months to the day since his affair with Meyer began, Jack Kennedy sat down for lunch with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Kennedy knew about Hoover’s old dossier on Inga Arvad, and he was aware that the FBI was keeping tabs on him. But now Hoover decided to share for the first time his knowledge about Kennedy’s trysts with “freelance artist” Judith Campbell since early 1960, citing phone calls she had made to Evelyn Lincoln’s office. The reason for Hoover’s disclosure was the FBI’s evidence that Campbell was also having affairs with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana and his associate Johnny Roselli, who had been involved in the CIA’s assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. That afternoon, Kennedy called Campbell for the last time and broke off the relationship.

  The next day, Kennedy flew to California to speak at Berkeley and inspect military facilities. Over the weekend he stayed with Dave Powers in Palm Springs at the luxurious home of Republican crooner Bing Crosby. Kennedy had been scheduled to stay at Frank Sinatra’s estate, but he had canceled the visit on the recommendation of Bobby Kennedy. RFK had known of Hoover’s information on Campbell and the mob since late February, including the fact that Sinatra, a good friend of Giancana, had described her as “shacking up with John Kennedy in the East.”

  Sinatra’s relationship with the Kennedys had been uneasy since Jackie strongly objected to his involvement in the presidential campaign. Through Lawford, the singer served as the impresario of the inaugural
gala, but Sinatra was offended that “he got in to see Jack only once alone” at the White House, according to Tina Sinatra, a fierce defender of her controversial father. The reason, Tina wrote, was that her father “personified a page of history that [the Kennedys] would rather have erased.” During the campaign, according to Tina, Sinatra had been a go-between for Joe Kennedy and Giancana: Joe had needed Giancana to get the support of “mob-infested unions” for the West Virginia primary, but since the Ambassador couldn’t risk approaching the mob boss directly, he asked Sinatra to do it instead.

  After Kennedy’s election, Bobby launched a vigorous campaign against the Mafia that included surveillance of Giancana and his associates. “Dad was stunned when the Administration began to prosecute the very people it had enlisted for help just the year before,” wrote Tina. Under those circumstances, Bobby wanted his brother to keep his distance from Sinatra, who had hired workmen around the clock to prepare accommodations for JFK’s late March visit to Palm Springs. When Lawford brought the bad news only days before the President’s scheduled arrival, Sinatra was enraged. With the end of his White House connection, Sinatra “blamed Peter for not standing up for him” and cut off his friendship with the British actor, whose Hollywood career declined as a result.

  On the weekend of March 24 and 25, while Jackie was visiting the Khyber Pass and riding on Bashir Ahmed’s camel, her husband had a rendezvous with Marilyn Monroe at Bing Crosby’s home, courtesy of Peter Lawford. Kennedy had seen the actress only intermittently since they disappeared together during the Democratic convention. But for all her status as the ultimate Hollywood sex symbol, Monroe was now on a self-destructive spiral—mentally unstable and addicted to drugs and alcohol.

  The Monroe liaison was the most vivid example of the personal risk-taking that Kennedy’s closest aides couldn’t square with his public caution. In his public life, Kennedy was reckless only when it came to Cuba. Ted Sorensen had said on television in early January 1962 that the Bay of Pigs taught Kennedy “something about the difficulties in a democracy of conducting a covert operation.” Yet the following spring, Operation Mongoose, the brain warp of Bobby Kennedy, was firmly in place. None other than Johnny Roselli—Justice Department investigations notwithstanding—was still engaged in conspiracies to eliminate Castro.

  Richard Helms, then the CIA’s deputy director for plans, later referred to these plots as “nutty schemes,” although he declined to say explicitly what the President knew. “There was nothing Bobby did that Jack didn’t want him to do,” said Helms. “I think Bobby made his contributions but he did what Jack said in the end. . . . What interests me about Bobby Kennedy is that in all those phone calls and meetings, Jack was driving him to get rid of Castro. Nobody but Jack could do that. Bobby couldn’t get away with doing it on his own.”

  The Cuban intelligence service was concerned enough about covert American activity to raise the prospect of an invasion. Castro transmitted these fears to Khrushchev, who was already worried about various indirect signals—articles in the American press, speeches by various administration officials—that emphasized U.S. military superiority and suggested the possibility of a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviets. Kennedy’s resumption of atmospheric nuclear tests on April 25—itself a response to the series of Soviet detonations—seemed designed to further reinforce American dominance over Moscow.

  These shared apprehensions drew Khrushchev and Castro together in the spring of 1962 to devise a plan to put nuclear missiles in Cuba. The maneuver had the potential to protect Cuba from the United States, enable the Soviet Union to force the Allies out of Berlin, and equalize the U.S.-Soviet nuclear balance. For all its obvious risks, the Cuban missile scheme seemed reasonable to Khrushchev, who equated it with the recent American deployment of nuclear warheads in Turkey on the Soviet border. Khrushchev had also seen Kennedy back down before—at the Bay of Pigs, in Laos, and in Berlin—so he had reason to believe the President would do so again. Khrushchev and Kennedy may have been exchanging ideas in their secret correspondence, but the Soviet leader failed to calculate the intensity of the President’s feelings about a nuclear threat inside the Western Hemisphere.

  Jackie marked her triumphant return from India and Pakistan on Thursday, March 29, by issuing a subdued, almost melancholy statement: “It feels unnatural to me to go on such a long semi-official trip without my husband,” she said. “I have missed my family and have no desire to be a public personality on my own.” Jack entered the cabin of the Caroline so that they could have a private reunion. Waiting on the tarmac to greet Jackie were the ambassadors from India and Pakistan, as well as Ken Galbraith, who received an unexpected kiss that he happily noted was “well-televised and widely reported.”

  Galbraith and the Schlesingers joined Jack and Jackie on Sunday at Glen Ora for dinner. It was a relaxed evening as they watched an NBC special on the trip with a running commentary from Jackie and Galbraith. JFK expressed his admiration for Jackie’s “general political grace and style,” Galbraith said. Schlesinger recalled that she offered “acute observations about Nehru.”

  Galbraith detected that Jackie seemed “a bit tired” but found her “handsome and compelling without benefit of makeup or hair-doing.” In fact she was exhausted, telling Janet Cooper that she couldn’t face any questions about the White House restoration for at least a week. “I don’t even care if the White House burns down!” she wrote. Jackie assured Cooper that she would see her “when I recover. Think it may be smallpox.”

  That Monday, Jackie flew from an airfield in Virginia with Caroline and John for eight days in Palm Beach to recuperate. She had scarcely returned to Washington when she was off once more to Florida with her family for a nine-day Easter holiday at the Paul estate. After her three-week absence from the White House in March, Jackie was away an equal amount of time in April. The President had to serve as solo host at a luncheon for twenty-four in honor of the Duchess of Devonshire, as well as a state visit by the president of Brazil. In his spare time he approved the script and screened rushes of PT 109 starring Cliff Robertson as a young JFK, and he tossed out the first baseball of the season at a new $24 million stadium in Washington, with Dave Powers at his side.

  The ambiance of Kennedy’s twice-daily swims with Powers improved considerably that month. Jackie considered the White House swimming pool drab and institutional, so she commissioned French artist Bernard LaMotte to decorate three of its bare walls (the fourth was mirrored) with vistas of St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. The murals depicting a cerulean Caribbean harbor bobbing with sailboats were a gift in Joe Kennedy’s name, echoing scenes at his favorite New York restaurant, Le Pavillon. To ensure that moisture wouldn’t peel off the paint, the Ambassador’s funds also paid for a special new exhaust system. JFK watched in fascination as the paintings slowly took form. At one point, LaMotte, working on a special platform, reached too far, lost his balance, and landed in the water.

  In April, Jackie periodically swooped into Washington to preside over selected high-profile events—a congressional reception, a youth concert on the South Lawn, a state dinner for the Shah of Iran and his wife, and a celebratory evening for forty-nine Nobel Prize winners, known as the “brains dinner” among the East Wing staff. The Shah’s wife, Empress Farah, wore “blindingly impressive” jewelry, including a tiara and necklace with huge emeralds and twenty-carat diamonds, while Jackie was the picture of simplicity with only diamond drop earrings and a diamond sunburst pin nestled in her “brioche” topknot. For entertainment Jackie brought in Jerome Robbins’s Ballets USA featuring jazz dancers in sweatshirts and sneakers, which she had seen in Europe and New York.

  Even with 175 guests, the Nobel dinner struck a surprisingly informal note—“one of the most stimulating parties ever” at the White House, according to the Washington Post. The host and hostess had nut brown tans, and Jackie wore a long dress of pale green jersey, pleated and draped like a Greek statue. Arthur Schlesinger “appeared to be self-conscious,�
� writer Diana Trilling observed, “as if borne down by his official White House connection.” During the cocktail hour, “a stupendous amount of liquor was flowing around,” wrote Trilling. Her “pleasantly looped” husband, Lionel, consumed six martinis and was overheard telling Jackie, “When you were at Vassar you weren’t much of a student but always personable.”

  At dinner JFK sat next to Ernest Hemingway’s widow, Mary, who contributed one of the evening’s three readings by actor Fredric March: a chapter from an unpublished novel by her late husband about a young American fighting Nazi submarines from his fishing boat. According to Diana Trilling, Hemingway’s prose was “so poor that one was pained for the man who had written it.” His widow “was having a tough time, poor woman,” Trilling observed, prompting Kennedy to do “something nice. He squeezed her arm comfortingly.”

  The President’s gesture was that much more magnanimous given his genuine feelings. During dinner Mary Hemingway had managed to irritate Kennedy profoundly by lecturing him about how to deal with Castro. Kennedy later told Walton she was “the biggest bore I’ve had for a long time.” But the elderly widow of George Marshall, seated on his other side, tickled the President by telling him, “I am so happy to get out of my briar patch and come here for dinner.” Rising for his remarks, Kennedy “at once had the place in his hands,” noted Trilling, when he said, “This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”