Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  As the official entertainment wound down, the Kennedys invited about a dozen guests upstairs to continue the party—“Jackie’s personal part of the evening,” Diana Trilling recalled, “her turn to have fun.” The Yellow Oval Room “was filled with cigar smokers and their lady companions,” William Styron wrote. “One would have thought the entire Nobel dinner had been arranged to produce this fragrant climax.” JFK sat in what Jackie described as his “health rocker” with a lit Havana, “wreathed in smoke,” wrote Styron, “relaxed and contented.”

  Oblivious to the mild insult about her Vassar days, Jackie was intent on probing Lionel Trilling’s insights as a distinguished literary critic. They debated the merits of The Rainbow and Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence, prompting Jackie to find her copy of British novelist Compton Mackenzie’s memoirs to locate a pertinent passage. “Jackie spoke very openly and unpretentiously . . . very sure of herself and reliant on her own wit,” wrote Diana Trilling. At twelve-thirty, Bobby Kennedy squeezed the Trillings, Robert Frost, and other guests into the elevator. With mock horror of the perils of overcrowding, Jackie said, “Think of the headlines tomorrow morning, with all these distinguished people dead at the bottom of the shaft!” “Hold on, Mr. Frost!” said Bobby, as he closed the grate and Jackie waved goodbye.

  By the time of the Nobel dinner, Jack Kennedy’s biggest domestic worry had been safely resolved, but only after a major blowup resulting from what the President viewed as a double cross. Since the previous September, Kennedy had been cajoling the steelworkers union and the steel industry to reach a noninflationary settlement on wages that would help hold the line on prices. Kennedy’s lingering fear for the economy—one legacy of his father’s training—continued to be the specter of inflation. During the first week in April, both sides agreed to a two-year contract with an acceptable increase of 2.5 percent—all in fringe benefits, with no wage increase. Roger Blough, the chairman of United States Steel, told Douglas Dillon it was “the best settlement . . . in twenty years.”

  Kennedy’s dealings with the business and financial communities had always been edgy. With the exception of Thomas J. Watson, president of IBM (who married JFK’s onetime girlfriend Olive Cawley), the President had few friends prominent in the business world. Even the businessmen in his inner circle were atypical: McNamara the maverick and Dillon the investment banker who had spent most of his career in public service. JFK’s father had been an independent operator detached from a wide range of business practices and attitudes. He had, as Ros Gilpatric put it, “only one slant on things.”

  Because Gilpatric mingled with tycoons through his New York legal practice, Kennedy frequently quizzed him on his experience. “Many of his questions were very naive because of what he’d learned from his father,” said Gilpatric. “He couldn’t understand what made businessmen tick.”

  On Tuesday, April 10, Roger Blough arrived in the Oval Office to announce that his company would hike prices by 3.5 percent, or $6 a ton—the first rise since 1958—with other steelmakers expected to follow suit. Kennedy was furious. “They kicked us right in the balls,” JFK fumed to Ben Bradlee. Kennedy felt particularly betrayed because he had carefully cultivated Blough for months as the chairman of his business advisory council. “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons-of-bitches, but I never believed it till now,” Kennedy told one aide after another—a characterization that was widely circulated in the business community.

  But Kennedy had not been completely blindsided. The previous Friday, Hal Korda, a New York public relations man close to U.S. Steel executives, had tipped his friend Charley Bartlett about the company’s intentions. Bartlett had immediately alerted Kennedy, whose advisers could find no confirmation. After Blough’s announcement, Bartlett (drawing on his connections to U.S. Steel through his wife’s family) played a key role as an intermediary and adviser to Kennedy. On Wednesday morning, Kennedy called Bartlett to ask whether he should take “a stiff or conciliatory line.” Bartlett counseled him to “play it rather straight . . . scare them a little but do not overdo.”

  Kennedy chose to overdo, denouncing the steelmakers in a televised statement for their “irresponsible defiance of the public interest.” His anger barely contained, his voice hard, Kennedy threw every threat in his power at the steelmakers: anti-trust and price-fixing investigations by Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Justice Department, as well as shifts of lucrative military contracts to steelmakers who kept prices stable.

  Bobby Kennedy rashly dispatched FBI agents to seize documents from steel company officials, threatening to prosecute them for income tax violations. Federal agents even woke up reporters in the middle of the night to interrogate them about statements made by steel officials. “It was highly overdone,” said Charley Bartlett. Bobby would later concede that “it was a tough way to operate, rather scary, but we couldn’t afford to lose it.”

  “The steel people made a terrible mistake,” said Dillon. “Kennedy quite rightly thought he had been double crossed. He blew up and Bobby blew up.” On Wednesday night as the Kennedys were entertaining the Shah of Iran, Korda called Bartlett to say that U.S. Steel was “ready to make peace.” Bartlett alerted Kennedy, who immediately agreed to negotiate. With Korda and Bartlett handling the logistics, the administration began a series of meetings with U.S. Steel executives.

  Kennedy enlisted Washington power broker Clark Clifford as his representative because, he told Bartlett, the lawyer “understood the workings of a politician’s mind and . . . the position that the politicians had to protect.” For public consumption, Kennedy continued the bluster, telling Ben Bradlee on Friday, “We’re going to tuck it to them and screw ’em.” As the secret talks proceeded that day in New York, Bethlehem Steel, the second largest producer, announced a price rollback, and U.S. Steel quickly followed.

  After only three days, the crisis was over, the investigations ceased, and Kennedy turned conciliatory. He met with Blough, who recalled that Kennedy “began to realize that there are two sides to this coin.” According to Bartlett, Kennedy believed that if Blough “had been smart enough to wait until summer” he could have slipped in a price increase. The problem, said Bartlett, was “the juxtaposition of the increase with [the wage] settlement.” Bartlett felt Kennedy was “very undoctrinaire” and understood that the steel industry was “entitled to an increase.” A year later when the steel companies moved to raise prices to cover their costs, Kennedy would voice no objections.

  Kennedy’s stance played well with the public, as his approval rating held at 77 percent. But what Time called the administration’s “almost totalitarian” tactics against the steel industry caused a breach with the business community that Kennedy never repaired. Even Harold Macmillan looked askance, sympathizing with Blough as a “modest and intelligent man” subjected by Kennedy to “a certain amount of blackmail.”

  Kennedy tried to retract his “sons-of-bitches” comment, claiming he meant to aim it only at the steel industry. In a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, he proclaimed his interest in helping business, not harming it. Continuing his singular role as sub rosa counselor, Bartlett “watched him work over that speech and discussed it with him.” But the audience responded coolly and continued what Bartlett called “this fixation” that the President was “out to cut the throat of business.”

  During the last weekend of April, Kennedy and Macmillan sat down together for talks—their fifth meeting in little over a year. JFK valued the opportunity to vent in his sessions alone with Macmillan. “He seems to want advice,” Macmillan noted. “At the same time it’s all very vague, and when we come down to brass tacks, we don’t make much headway. . . . He is very secretive and suspicious of leaks.” Macmillan was surprised by the “bitterness of his feeling . . . against the French.” Kennedy complained about “de Gaulle’s rudeness to Rusk” and the French leader’s “being cynical in his policy.” Macmillan thought that JFK suffered for not taking “the same humorous view of this
sort of treatment as we are willing to do.”

  On Sunday the two leaders had lunch at the White House with Jackie and the Gores. Much of their conversation focused on The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman, about the series of blunders that led to World War I. Kennedy had just finished the book, which reinforced his belief that war usually was the result of misunderstanding and miscalculation, a view that he had shared the previous year with Khrushchev. JFK had already urged his top advisers, especially in the military, to read the book, and he presented a copy to Macmillan.

  More than ever, Macmillan recognized the importance of David Gore’s unique relationship with the President. David and Sissie made an easy foursome with Jack and Jackie, keeping each other company over dinner and on weekends in the country. A statuesque beauty with porcelain skin and black hair who resembled “a Plantagenet, with a strong face,” Sissie was as graceful on horseback as Jackie. Sissie had a fey, fawnlike manner, and her strong Catholicism gave her “a certain puritan streak,” recalled British politician Roy Jenkins. “But if she disapproved of Jack, she kept it under wraps.”

  Jackie considered the early part of May “the worst two weeks of the year—morning, lunch, tea and dinner official things” that she could not escape. She endured lunches in her honor given by the Senate Ladies Red Cross and the Congressional Club, where she occupied herself by mouthing the words to Kismet and other show tunes sung by Broadway star Alfred Drake. She gave a tea for nearly two hundred Farmington students, faculty, trustees, and alumnae, including Lem Billings’s mother, and she christened a nuclear-powered submarine with a hearty “Je vous baptise Lafayette!”

  On the way to the ceremony in Groton, Connecticut, she stopped in New York to see Joe Kennedy, who was settling into Horizon House, a rehabilitation facility at New York University Medical Center. “While the others pretended not to notice the side of his body that was affected by the paralysis, she always held his deformed hand and kissed the affected side of his face,” wrote the Ambassador’s nurse Rita Dallas. “Her lack of fear helped him overcome his.” During her two-hour visit, Jackie pushed him in his wheelchair, read to him from that day’s front page, talked of her children, and told him “the little blunders the President would make while he was at home. . . . Her visit . . . was done in a whisper, and when she left, he was completely calm.”

  Before the social season ended, the Kennedys hosted their memorable dinner for Frederick “Fritz” Loewe, in which the composer played selections from Camelot and My Fair Lady on the baby grand piano in the Center Hall of the second floor. The Bradlees and Spaldings joined Jack and Jackie, along with Bill Walton and Helen Chavchavadze. Since JFK had been friendly with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner since Choate, he already knew a fair amount about his work. With Lerner’s collaborator Kennedy was a relentless quidnunc: “How do you go about writing a piece of music?” “Do you write the music first?” Loewe explained that he always wrote music “for a purpose” and demonstrated the complex process of composing, which transfixed the President.

  The Kennedys also gave one more dinner dance that spring, this time in honor of Ken Galbraith. Just thirty-five guests made the cut, including Mary Meyer and Helen Chavchavadze. The McNamaras, Bundys, Schlesingers, and Earl Smiths were there, as well as bachelors Bill Walton, Arkady Gerney, and Walter Sohier, a handsome favorite of Jackie’s who had lived for some years next to Merrywood. Galbraith pronounced himself satisfied with the “good and sometimes sultry looks” of the women, particularly his dinner partners, a “Swedish-French actress” and Lilly Pulitzer, with “a rich Palm Beach suntan and admirable shape.” This time the champagne-fueled dancing didn’t break up until 5 a.m. Galbraith claimed to awaken four hours later with “a remarkably clear head.”

  Far more important to Jackie was the dinner in mid-May for 168 luminaries in honor of André Malraux that she had been planning since January. As Malraux had done for her at the Jeu de Paume, she first took him on a tour of the National Gallery, although he had already announced, “I know the National Gallery by heart. The most haunting painting in it—here, I’ll write it for you, ‘La Balayeuse’ by Rembrandt.” He predictably “strode through” the gallery “expounding freely on the history and impact of some of its masterpieces.”

  Jackie welcomed the French statesman by giving him two rare nineteenth-century books of political caricatures from Uncle Hughdie’s library. Only later did she learn that they were worth $2,000—the equivalent of $12,000 today. She wore a luminous strapless gown in pink silk shantung designed by Christian Dior, once again crowning her leonine hairdo with a diamond sunburst.

  To match Malraux’s varied experience as a novelist, art critic, philosopher, and resistance fighter, she filled the guest list with artists and writers, among them Tennessee Williams, Saul Bellow, Elia Kazan, Geraldine Page, Archibald MacLeish, Andrew Wyeth, and George Balanchine, who nearly was turned away because he arrived by taxicab wearing a shabby raincoat. Jackie also included such patrons of the arts as the Wrightsmans and the John Loebs. JFK insisted on some “great Americans,” namely the reclusive Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, who surprisingly accepted and stayed in the White House. Kennedy particularly liked the idea that Lindbergh had “landed in France.” “This is becoming a sort of eating place for artists,” Kennedy quipped in his toast to Malraux, “But they never ask us out.”

  Malraux spoke little English, so Jackie placed Walt Rostow’s wife, Elspeth, a history professor who was fluent in French, on his other side to translate for playwright Arthur Miller. The previous year, Miller had been divorced from Marilyn Monroe, whose allure for JFK was known to Jackie—and who barely a week later would be the headline act in a birthday tribute to the President. Malraux, a dapper sixty-year-old with sleek black hair, “wanted to talk to Arthur Miller more than he wanted to talk to the President’s wife,” said Rostow.

  It turned out that Miller’s French was workmanlike, so Rostow became “the unnecessary third party.” Jackie remained unruffled by Malraux’s disregard for dinner party protocol. “Her manners were perfect,” said Rostow. From time to time, Malraux turned to Jackie, and she murmured to him in French, at one point confiding that German chancellor Konrad Adenauer was “un peu gaga.” As the evening came to a close, Malraux confirmed his pleasure by promising that France would lend the Mona Lisa to the National Gallery.

  Some months later, Kennedy told Cy Sulzberger that he had difficulty communicating with Malraux and wasn’t much impressed with him “above all on political or diplomatic matters.” Yet over lunch at Glen Ora at the end of the Frenchman’s visit, the President was keen to hear Malraux’s theories about the endurance of mythology in contemporary society. When Malraux wondered whether ideologies such as capitalism and socialism were the real issues, Kennedy ventured that “the management of industrial society” had superseded ideology, and that most problems had become administrative and technical questions. It was a theme he would repeat two weeks later in an economic conference at the White House, and the following month in a commencement address at Yale designed to encourage innovative thinking about the economy. Business, labor, and government, Kennedy maintained, had “to look at things as they are, not through party labels.”

  Kennedy’s speeches on the economy were also intended to win over the business community. Dillon had been working for many months on a decidedly pro-business investment tax credit providing incentives to buy new equipment, but Democratic senator Harry Byrd, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, had termed the credit a “give-away” and stalled the bill.

  Throughout the fall of 1961, the economy had been growing, and in December the stock market had hit an all-time high of 734.91. But January brought a slowdown that deepened with the steel crisis. According to Dillon, business felt that “the government was going to try to control prices generally, which, of course, was never the President’s idea.” As confidence dimmed, a slide in stock prices began to feed on itself. Finally, on Monday, May 28, the market dove from 611 to 576, the
largest one-day point drop since 1929.

  Kennedy immediately called Galbraith, the self-proclaimed “Thucydides of the 1929 crash,” who was vacationing in Vermont. The President’s first instinct was to go on television to “calm fevered nerves.” Galbraith opposed Kennedy’s plan, arguing that “he would put his prestige on the line” and make the situation seem more grave than it was. Bundy, Dillon, and other aides agreed with Galbraith. Dillon believed the plunge was “a psychological occurrence largely motivated by excessive fear, and . . . would work itself out.” The Treasury secretary made a careful public statement emphasizing the fundamental soundness of the economy and characterizing the market drop as a necessary correction. He pointed out that inflation had been quelled, and that stable prices would mean a rising economy.

  When Jack Kennedy turned forty-five the following day, the stock market rewarded him by rallying to 603.96, signaling an end to the momentary panic. Kennedy kept his focus on a push to pass the investment tax credit bill in 1962, and at a press conference on June 7 he announced that in January he would introduce his long-promised legislation to reduce taxes across the board.

  The President celebrated his birthday on the twenty-ninth at Glen Ora with Jackie, Lem, Jean, Bobby, Ethel, Sarge, and Eunice. Chef René Verdon prepared a chocolate cake with fudge icing that was transported to Virginia by helicopter. The President never saw the extravagant white and yellow flower-covered rocking chair sent by Frank Sinatra. In a final insult to the banished singer, the gift was donated to Children’s Hospital shortly after it arrived at the White House.

  The more memorable birthday event had occurred ten days earlier at a nationally televised Democratic fundraising rally in Madison Square Garden. Kennedy delighted in performances by the likes of Maria Callas, Harry Belafonte, Ella Fitzgerald, and Jack Benny, who cracked, “The amazing thing to me is how a man in a rocking chair can have such a young wife.” The President allowed that his father’s “all businessmen are SOBs” maxim didn’t apply to show business.