The showstopper of the evening was Marilyn Monroe. “The figure was famous,” wrote Time. “And for one breathless moment the 15,000 people in Madison Square Garden thought they were going to see all of it. Onto the stage sashayed Marilyn Monroe, attired in a great bundle of white mink. Arriving at the lectern, she turned and swept the furs from her shoulders. A slight gasp rose from the audience before it was realized that she was really wearing a skintight flesh toned gown.” Kennedy grinned as Monroe sang a breathy and seductive “Happy Birthday.” “I can now retire from politics,” he announced, “after having had Happy Birthday sung to me in such a sweet wholesome way.” But the suggestive performance raised eyebrows. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen called it nothing less than “making love to the President in the direct view of forty million Americans.”
Afterwards, Kennedy attended a gathering of about a hundred people at the home of United Artists head Arthur Krim on East Sixty-ninth Street, where a photographer caught Jack and Bobby in the library hovering over Monroe dressed in what she called “skin and beads.” “I didn’t see the beads!” Adlai Stevenson wrote to Mary Lasker, describing his “perilous encounters” with the film star that evening, “only after breaking through the strong defenses established by Robert Kennedy, who was dodging around her like a moth around the flame.” Bill Walton (who later insisted that Monroe “was not the mistress of any Kennedy. Never”) recalled that he and JFK stood on a staircase and watched as “Marilyn started making passes at Bobby, and backing him up against the wall. . . . He didn’t know what to do or where to look. . . . We’re upstairs rocking with laughter.”
Arthur Schlesinger said both he and Bobby met Monroe that night for the first time. Schlesinger was “enchanted by her manner and her wit, at once so masked, so ingenuous and so penetrating. But one felt a terrible unreality about her—as if talking to someone under water.” Given her weakness for dangerous combinations of alcohol and pills (she had attempted suicide a number of times, most recently the previous month), Monroe was probably high that evening—at least judging by behavior witnessed by Walton. “She was an exhibitionist,” he said. “I caught her . . . in a darkened bedroom, standing before a window, making a naked erotic dance for guards who were on the rooftop of an adjoining building.”
Jackie had wisely avoided the Marilyn Monroe spectacle by remaining in Virginia, where she competed as a “surprise participant” in the Loudoun Hunt Horse Show. She took third place in one of three classes, riding Minbreno, a horse she owned jointly with Eve Fout. Jack had debated the political wisdom of letting her participate in such a fancy public event (unlike her hunting, which was private), even asking Mac Bundy for advice. His national security adviser replied with some doggerel:
It is a sign of pride—a horse,
But not a thing to hide—a horse,
Assuming you provide—of course,
A brave and lovely lady who can ride.
For voters dare to admire the fair,
And voters crave to honor the brave;
Only the rich are likely to bitch,
But which rich itch for us anyway?
So smothering doubts the President shouts,
“I who decide say, ‘Let her ride!’”
As the summer holiday approached, Jackie wrapped up the latest additions to her restoration project. In May the Rose Garden redesign by Bunny Mellon was completed. It was, in fact, more Jack Kennedy’s inspiration than Jackie’s. He had enlisted Bunny the previous August during a picnic at the Mellon beach house in Osterville. Inspired by gardens he had seen during his European visit, he wanted a landscape “to appeal to the most discriminating taste, yet . . . hold a thousand people for a ceremony.” Kennedy had also read Thomas Jefferson’s garden notes and told Mellon he “hoped for flowers used in Jefferson’s period.”
Mellon brought in Perry Wheeler, a highly regarded landscape architect, as her collaborator. Throughout the fall she had pondered design ideas. At the Pablo Casals dinner in November, JFK gazed at her across the table and said, “Bunny, where is my garden plan?” It was still in her head, and shortly afterwards she committed the scheme to paper—the four bare corners of the new garden anchored by magnolia trees, and a broad lawn defined at either side by what Mellon described as a “tapestry of flowers that would change with the season,” accented by the garden’s signature roses. The beds would be shaded by ten flowering crab-apple trees and bordered by lines of low boxwood hedges.
Mellon dug up the old garden in March and had it ready two months later. The President designed the steps and platform for ceremonies outside the doors of his office, and he constantly monitored Mellon’s progress. He drew the line, however, at her vision of a “gaily striped pavilion” at the east end of the garden: “Too exotic,” he told her. Mellon often worked in the late afternoons “changing and pruning plants” as she watched Kennedy at his desk. “I was aware of and touched,” she recalled, “by the serious tranquility of this scene.”
Jackie unveiled both the new White House library and Treaty Room in June. With its soft palette of colors and suite of Duncan Phyfe furniture, the library was intended to capture the classical period of Jefferson and Adams, two of the most “bookish” presidents. The room bore the strong imprint of Harry du Pont, although Boudin advised Jackie on the paint color and antique Aubusson rug. The 2,500 volumes still needed to be assembled by a committee of scholars including Arthur Schlesinger—a “working library,” said Jackie, not a collection of priceless editions for “a frozen assemblage in a museum display.”
The Treaty Room was discernibly Victorian, Jackie’s least favorite period, but she recognized its value as what she called “the most historic room in the White House,” filled entirely with authentic presidential furniture of “rather ugly charm.” Most of the ponderous relics dated from Lincoln and Grant. Jackie covered the walls in flocked dark green wallpaper trimmed in a red diamond–patterned border copied from the room where Lincoln died—a dramatic design conceived entirely by Boudin. To emphasize the room’s purpose as a setting for historic events, Jackie hung reproductions of famous treaties signed when the cabinet met there regularly in the second half of the nineteenth century.
On the same early summer day that Jackie opened the Treaty Room, she received the first copies of the new White House guidebook. Standing in the West Wing’s Fish Room, the President read aloud from Jackie’s foreword, which she had rewritten in a more conversational style than Schlesinger’s elegiac version. She told of expanding her original idea of aiming the book at children to include “adults and scholars also . . . on the theory that it never hurts a child to read something that may be above his head.” In keeping with Jackie’s wish not to seem “conceited,” she included only one image of herself, sitting in the East Room audience as Pablo Casals played the cello.
TWENTY-ONE
During his second summer in the White House, Jack Kennedy experienced a sharp drop in his approval rating. By September it reached a new low of 62 percent—not as bad as Eisenhower’s 56 percent in September 1958, or Truman’s 43 percent at the same time in 1950. Still, given Kennedy’s 79 percent approval as recently as March, the plunge was unnerving.
Kennedy failed even to get much of a bounce from a splashy three-day trip to Mexico at the end of June. The Kennedys drew a tumultuous welcome from more than a million people in Mexico City. Once again, the people and press were enchanted by Jackie’s beauty, and her Cassini-designed dresses in shimmering “sun colors” of pink, azure, yellow, and green.
For all the regal aspects of the quick tour, it was Jackie’s down-to-earth manner that caught the emotions of Mexicans. At a luncheon given by President Adolfo LÓpez Mateos, she delivered from memory a short speech in impeccable Spanish. Betraying slight nervousness, she rubbed her hands occasionally as she spoke of “the underlying values” of the Mexican culture, “the profound faith in man’s dignity” shown in the country’s art and literature. The Washington Post detected no shift in the Mexican-American pol
itical equation but a “change in the attitude on the part of government and people” in America’s southern neighbor.
Only days after the Kennedys returned to Washington, Jackie left for a summer holiday that would again last more than three months. For greater privacy and security, the Kennedys rented a seven-bedroom home in Hyannis owned by tenor Morton Downey, a longtime family friend. It was on Squaw Island, a half mile from the family compound and connected to the mainland by a short causeway. Teddy and Joan’s house was across the road.
During the summer of 1962, Jackie was more detached from her official duties than she had been the previous year—in part because she had reached so many of her goals in the White House restoration, but also because she wished more than ever to escape the pressures of her role. Like Bess Truman before her, Jackie considered her time away from Washington sacrosanct. When the president of Ecuador came for a state visit, it was Rose who accompanied JFK to the capital, and when the wives of bankers from the International Monetary Fund met at the White House for tea, Janet Auchincloss flew down from Newport to be their hostess.
Instead of talking to her staff on the phone, Jackie began taping instructions on Dictabelts that were sent to Washington by the Army Signal Corps. “She became more remote,” said Janet Cooper. “I felt it was because of Tish, who was very demanding, telling Jackie to do things, and Jackie didn’t want to hear it.” Still, Jackie was “very organized. She had the memos down pat. She asked a million questions, wanted to know thoroughly what everything was. She was very much on top of things.”
In his press conferences and other public appearances, Kennedy was unvaryingly upbeat despite bouts of severe back pain. Summoned to the White House after the steel crisis, Max Jacobson found JFK “tense and apprehensive.” Following a treatment, Jacobson recorded that Kennedy “smiled and said, ‘Now I can go downstairs to shake hands with several hundred intimate friends.’” In May the President’s special bed had appeared for the first time in the White House screening room to enable him to watch films in greater comfort. A month later he needed to take one of his rocking chairs to a dinner party in the garden of Jean Smith’s Georgetown home. In midsummer Stas Radziwill told Cy Sulzberger that Kennedy’s “back still bothers him, and he can’t play golf.”
Under those circumstances, Kennedy’s stamina in meetings was remarkable—a phenomenon witnessed by his closest advisers, but only revealed publicly decades later with the disclosure of a secret taping system that he installed on July 28 and 29 in the Oval Office, Cabinet Room, and “study/library” (probably the Treaty Room) on the second floor of the Executive Mansion. Kennedy recorded just those conversations and meetings he wished to preserve by the flip of a switch.
The existence of the system was known only to its technicians, members of the Secret Service, Evelyn Lincoln, Bobby Kennedy and his secretary Angie Novello, and possibly Kenny O’Donnell. Vice President Johnson remained in the dark until he became president, when he decided to expand the system and tape far more extensively. Richard Nixon would install an even more elaborate voice-activated system for his presidency.
Kennedy kept his rationale for the recording system to himself. He doubtless was thinking of his own memoirs and the needs of future historians. Much of what he recorded cast him in a favorable light, displaying his ability to move seamlessly from one issue to the next across the day, and to immerse himself in each topic with commendable mastery. But the whirring tapes captured moments of profanity, pettiness, and temper. He also chose to begin the recordings when his popularity was at a low ebb, the economy was stalled, and he faced growing crises in foreign policy.
Only two weeks earlier, Newsweek had written that critics on both the right and left were castigating him simultaneously for being “a power-drunk dictator” (for his performance in the steel crisis) and an “ineffectual rhetorician” (for his legislative quagmire). Despite JFK’s efforts to placate the business community and signs that the stock market was gaining strength, business investment continued to lag, unemployment was rising, and Kennedy’s economic advisers were privately worrying about a recession. Congress had defeated Kennedy’s “cherished” Medicare legislation by 52 to 48, and influential columnists like Walter Lippmann were pressing him for a “quickie” tax cut to kick start the economy. After lying dormant for nearly a year, Berlin had reemerged as an issue as well, with intermittent Soviet harassment in the air corridors to West Berlin and distant rumblings from Khrushchev about signing the peace treaty that would expel the Allies from the city.
Kennedy’s singular success was the completion of the Geneva Accords on Laos toward the end of July—more than a year after tortuous negotiations began following the cease-fire arranged by the United States and Russia. The shaky coalition government was now buttressed by international agreement, and its neutrality was guaranteed. Still, Kennedy worried that the Pathet Lao would violate the agreement, and wondered how the United States should react.
The first day of taping in the White House on Monday, July 30, showed that Kennedy’s closest advisers had grown comfortable enough in his presence to joke as well as express firm opinions. When Kennedy started to denounce diplomats who “don’t seem to have cojones,” especially one who didn’t “present a very virile figure,” Dean Rusk disagreed. But Kennedy persisted, railing against “languid” American diplomats who didn’t seem “hard and tough” compared to the new Soviet envoy, Anatoly Dobrynin, who appeared “assured and confident.” Mac Bundy laughingly dismissed the Russian as an “aircraft engineer” and sided with Rusk to defend American diplomats, saying “the appearance is somewhat deceptive.” Kennedy ended the conversation by resurrecting the memory of his father’s counselor in London, Herschel Johnson, “an old lady if you ever saw one . . . He used to call my father Jeeves, which drove my father mad.”
Such moments of recorded levity were rare, as Kennedy kept the focus on details and pressed for new ideas. Later that day he shifted from an hour-long meeting on the economy to an intricate two-hour discussion of a nuclear test ban that included myriad technical details of monitoring seismic signals from underground explosions. Faced with disagreement among his men about the number of on-site inspections to request from Khrushchev, Kennedy effectively synthesized their arguments as the meeting drew to a close. His temporary solution was to bring in wise men Robert Lovett and John McCloy for further discussions.
That night, following an off-the-record interview with investigative journalist Clark Mollenhoff, Jack entertained Mary Meyer and railroad executive Bill Thompson. It was hardly a tranquil interlude, with interruptions for phone calls from Dean Rusk, Lee Radziwill, Jackie (twice), Peter Lawford, and Pierre Salinger. The first phone conversation JFK had the next morning was with Helen Chavchavadze, whom he had seen ten days earlier during a Potomac cruise on the Sequoia.
Meyer showed up on the White House entry logs five evenings in the summer of 1962—once in June, twice in July, once in August, and once the Wednesday after Labor Day weekend. Jim Reed, who had separated from his wife, Jewel, in June, recalled attending one of those dinners along with Ben and Tony Bradlee. Reed thought Meyer had “a lovely way about her. . . . She was quiet, very much of a lady.” Although Jack and Meyer were “very friendly,” Reed saw no hint of intimacy.
“It was mostly Ben and the President talking,” said Reed. “I couldn’t get a word in.” Ben was baiting JFK about Frank Morrissey, a longtime retainer for Joe Kennedy who was a municipal court judge in Boston. The previous year Kennedy had tried to appoint Morrissey to the federal bench, but had backed away when bar associations found him unfit. “Bradlee was critical, and Jack defended it,” said Reed. “It was lively and interesting.”
James Truitt later claimed that during Meyer’s visit on July 16, she and the President smoked marijuana together—an allegation that was never independently corroborated. Truitt made his revelation to the National Enquirer, which published an article in its March 2, 1976, issue about JFK’s affair with Meyer. Truitt had
been suffering from alcoholism and mental illness since the early sixties, and he sold his story to the newspaper for $1,000. He said his information came from notes he made of conversations with Meyer during the Kennedy presidency.
Meyer did confide in James Truitt, but not until late in 1962, some six months after she told Anne about the affair. During that period, said Anne Truitt, James was often “drunk and out of control.” Like others in the art world, Mary experimented with marijuana. “Mary was a risk taker,” said Kenneth Noland. “She was quite curious about a lot of things.” But Noland—and the Bradlees, for that matter—knew nothing of such behavior with Jack Kennedy. Nor did Meyer tell Anne about drug use in the White House.
Ben, Tony, and Anne all read a diary kept by Meyer that the Bradlees found after her death in 1964. In later years much was made of the supposedly explosive information about Kennedy that the diary contained. The diary’s disclosure of an affair with JFK stunned the Bradlees, and Tony “was devastated,” said Ben. But the “little notebook with a pretty cover,” as Anne Truitt described it, consisted mostly of jottings about Mary’s art, and paint swatches on otherwise blank pages. Only about ten pages were devoted to Kennedy, who was never mentioned by name.
Anne, who had been told about the diary by Meyer, was “just floored” to find it was “nothing, nada, a series of scrawls and notes, not in order, no chronology, no real facts.” Tony considered it “very cryptic. You had to sort of interpret. It wasn’t a fascinating look at the whole situation at all. It was more like putting images that were in her mind, the atmosphere when she saw Jack.” Said Ben Bradlee, “No entry was more than twenty-five words. They were tiny little things. There was nothing about dope in the diary at all.” Still, “it was perfectly obvious that Mary was describing the affair,” he said, “and that it was obviously the President of the United States. There were phrases like, ‘At the party the other night,’ and it was obvious which party it was.”
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