Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  After James Truitt’s interviews with the National Enquirer, Tony decided to destroy the diary. She called Anne Truitt (by then divorced from James), who lived across the street in Washington, and they watched the notebook burn in Tony’s fireplace. “Everyone thought it was full of all kinds of gossip which it wasn’t,” said Tony. “I think I burned it because there was interest in the diary, and I didn’t want the kids to get into it.”

  In June 1962, Jack Kennedy gave a television interview to Eleanor Roosevelt about his Commission on the Status of Women. By way of example, he singled out graduates of Radcliffe, whose “curve of academic excellence . . . is higher than it is at Harvard.” He expressed regret that these young women “get married, many of them become housewives. . . . I wonder whether they have had the full opportunity to develop their talents, and as the Greeks said, the definition of happiness is full use of your powers along the lines of excellence. And I wonder whether they have had that opportunity.”

  Kennedy’s special Radcliffe friend, Diana de Vegh, could find little comfort in the Greek credo. After more than a year on JFK’s staff, she was having difficulty dealing with their occasional surreptitious meetings. From time to time she saw other men socially; besides Billy Brammer, she went out with Mary Meyer’s former husband Cord, then forty-two, who also dated Jill “Faddle” Cowan. At age twenty-four, de Vegh was feeling disillusioned about her work and thought Kennedy seemed indifferent to her.

  De Vegh was unaware of Mary Meyer and Helen Chavchavadze, nor did she detect the appearance of a still younger woman on Kennedy’s radar that summer. She was nineteen-year-old Marion “Mimi” Beardsley (later Mimi Fahnestock), who came to the White House for an internship after her freshman year at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. As the editor of the newspaper at Farmington, she had originally asked Tish Baldrige to help arrange an interview with the First Lady for a profile of the school’s most famous alumnus. Baldrige provided background material and arranged Beardsley’s visit to Washington in 1961. While she was in the White House, Beardsley “was brought over and met with the President,” said Barbara Gamarekian. The young woman also met Farmington graduate Priscilla “Fiddle” Wear. A year later, at Wear’s invitation, Beardsley came to work in Pierre Salinger’s office. In June 1962, shortly after her arrival at the White House, Beardsley began what she later described as “a sexual relationship” with JFK.

  “She wasn’t in the office very long before the press began to ask why she was there,” recalled Gamarekian. “Mimi had no skills. She couldn’t type. . . . She was a bright girl. She could answer the telephone and she could handle messages. . . . But she was not really a great asset to us.” Customarily the assignments for presidential trips rotated among the office girls. In the summer of 1962, however, Mimi “made all the trips!” said Gamarekian. “She loved the summer job, so she didn’t want to go back to school.” Finally, at the insistence of her family, Beardsley returned to Wheaton that autumn.

  Diana de Vegh’s father had died in the spring of 1962, and three or four months later, she confided her unhappiness to Marc Raskin on the NSC staff. Her colleague was aware of the romance with Kennedy “in this way that people know things around the White House,” Raskin recalled. But when she spoke of her sadness, he urged her to escape. She went to Mac Bundy to say she was leaving. He inquired about her plans, and she told him she intended to live in Paris. Jack Kennedy also asked what she wanted to do, and said he hoped to see her again. After living in France, she returned to the United States and became an actress, eventually joining the cast of the daytime television drama All My Children. Along the way she earned a master’s in social work at Columbia University, worked at a liberal think tank in Washington, and found her métier as a psychotherapist.

  As Diana de Vegh was escaping, Marilyn Monroe was falling apart. Following her performance for Jack Kennedy’s birthday, Monroe began telling people in Hollywood that she and the President were having an affair. JFK cut off contact with her, but she started calling Bobby Kennedy’s office, presumably asking for his intercession. “Phone records show conversations,” said RFK biographer Evan Thomas. “She was a very troubled woman.” Bobby became involved in “damage control” and, according to Thomas, “saw her on four occasions,” although Thomas doubted the allegations that Bobby slept with her too.

  Fearful that the Monroe stories would surface in Hollywood gossip columns, JFK asked George Smathers for help. The Florida senator later said he dispatched a friend to persuade Monroe to stop talking. In her last interview, with Richard Meryman of Life magazine in midsummer 1962, Monroe said nothing incriminating about the President. Instead she confessed to stage fright before singing “Happy Birthday”: “You think, ‘By God, I’ll sing this song if it’s the last thing I ever do.’”

  She seemed downbeat but impressively lucid about the “special burden” of fame. “You kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way,” she said. “It stirs up envy, fame does. . . . It warms you a bit but the warming is temporary.” Twice she echoed comments Jackie had made earlier, saying, “I’ve always had too much fantasy to be only a housewife” and “I just hate to be a thing”—not unlike Jackie’s observation at the inauguration: “I felt as though I had just turned into a piece of public property.”

  Meryman’s interview was published on Friday, August 3. The next day, Monroe called Peter Lawford, who was sufficiently alarmed by her slurred speech to alert the actress’s manager. Assured by Monroe’s housekeeper that she was fine, the manager did nothing. On Sunday the fifth, Monroe was found dead. Lawford notified JFK, who had spent a sunny afternoon on a five-hour cruise with his family aboard the Patrick J, a sixty-four-foot navy yacht—Jack lounging in the cockpit, Jackie water-skiing behind a small speedboat. Kennedy made no public comment on the superstar’s death.

  The Washington Post’s banner headline on Monday reported: “MARILYN MONROE IS FOUND DEAD: SLEEPING DRUG OVERDOSE IS TENTATIVELY BLAMED.” That morning, moments after alighting from his helicopter on the South Lawn, Kennedy jovially greeted a group of teenage performers on hand for the fourth of Jackie’s concerts by young people. Throughout the hour-long performance, he kept the Oval Office door open so that he could hear the music. He met at midday with Arthur Schlesinger and August Heckscher, took a swim, and retired to the second floor for lunch. He didn’t return to the office from the Executive Mansion until nearly 5 p.m. His last meeting of the day was with Wilbur Mills, where he learned that the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee opposed a “quickie tax cut.” After an extended discussion the President agreed with Mills to stay on course with his plan to introduce tax reduction and reform legislation early in 1963. Forty-five minutes after Mills left the West Wing, Mary Meyer arrived in the mansion for the evening.

  When Jack Kennedy said goodbye to Jackie and Caroline in Hyannis on that morning of August 6, it was his last glimpse of them for nearly a month. The next day mother and daughter left for a holiday on Italy’s Amalfi coast with Lee, Stas, and their two children. The Kennedys flew on a commercial flight, in a specially prepared bedroom converted from a four-seat section of the first-class cabin.

  They stayed in Villa Episcopio, a nine hundred–year-old home in Ravello, perched on a cliff 1,200 feet above the Bay of Salerno. On the evening of their arrival, the town illuminated its main square with hundreds of red, green, blue, and white decorative lights. Jackie took in the scene from her villa’s high terrace a block away. Lee and Stas invited an assortment of friends including Gianni and Marella Agnelli, who stayed for a week; Arkady Gerney; Lee’s close friend Sandro D’Urso; and Benno and Nicole Graziani, who were with Jackie for the entire vacation. “We went sightseeing and sailing,” recalled Marella. “The conversation was extremely light. Benno made them laugh, which was a great advantage. Jackie and Lee were on very good terms. It was a real vacation in a different place.”

  For several days, Jackie and her party joined the Agnellis on cruises aboard their eighty-two-foot yac
ht, the Agneta, with its distinctive brown sails. They took one overnight trip to Capri, prompting Caroline to make “angry faces” when she was left behind in Ravello. Dining at the villa of the Agnellis’ friend Irene Galitzine, Italy’s top fashion designer, they were serenaded by three singers with guitars. Afterwards they danced at Number Two, Capri’s most fashionable nightclub, until the early morning hours. On their return trip, they giddily sang “Volare.” When the group returned to their beach house, Conca Dei Marini, the next afternoon, Jackie, wearing a light blue blouse and white slacks, sat barefoot on the deck while the canvas sails billowed behind her.

  Over the years, a number of accounts suggested that Jackie had gone off alone with Gianni that night. But Marella was also aboard, along with several other friends and Clint Hill, Jackie’s chief Secret Service agent, who also attended the dinner in Capri. Nevertheless, one report decades later in Vanity Fair said that Jackie’s cruise with Agnelli “was notable for a fair amount of kissing, caught on film by the paparazzi.” That sort of public display of affection was entirely out of character for Jackie, and indeed no such photographs have ever turned up.

  There are images of Jackie and Gianni walking along the dock, dining in cafes, relaxing on the yacht, and picnicking on a beach. Some pictures are artfully framed to suggest Jackie and Gianni were alone, but they were always in the company of friends and family. The raciest image shows Jackie in a black-and-white bathing suit holding a small bottle of suntan lotion in her right hand as Gianni bends over, his face touching her left forearm while he holds her wrist. Behind him is a woman in a bikini, looking down, and a man sunbathing beside her.

  “There was nothing between Gianni and Jackie,” said Benno Graziani, Gianni’s closest friend. “We were with them the whole time.” Added Lee Radziwill, “Obviously there is no truth in it whatsoever.” Noted Countess Marina Cicogna, an intimate friend of both Agnellis, “It was not like Gianni” to have an affair with Jackie. “He didn’t want to be involved in things that were complicated, and that would have been complicated. Also I’m not sure Jackie was the type he was attracted to.”

  Jackie wrote her first letter to “Dearest dearest Jack” on her third day in Italy. Her tone was wistful, her emotions slightly at bay. “I miss you very much,” she began, “which is nice though it is also a bit sad—because it is always best to leave someone when you are happy & this was such a lovely summer.” She noted that Caroline had fit in more readily with the Italian routines than she had, “but then I think of how lucky I am to miss you—I know I exaggerate everything, but I feel sorry for everyone else who is married.”

  Jackie went on for ten pages to describe her activities. She lamented having missed JFK’s calls, which couldn’t get through the little Ravello switchboard. “I waited till 3 AM for the call—then they said it was an imposter . . . that happened again at 6 AM,” she wrote. “I would love to talk to you—& if you have called & haven’t gotten me please know I have waited 3 hours each time & then been told they ‘lost connection.’” (He eventually got through—several times at 3 a.m.) She expressed relief at not having to worry about tax cuts and other pressing issues. “I am having something you can never have—the absence of tension—no —newspapers every day to make me mad,” she continued. “I wish so much I could give you that—I never realized till I got to another country how the tension is—But I can’t give you that. So I give you every day while I think of you—the only thing I have to give & I hope it matters to you.”

  After two weeks, Jackie was enjoying her escape so much she decided to stay nearly two weeks more. “Jackie was very quiet, very nice, gentle and serene,” said Benno Graziani. “She was cooking spaghetti for Caroline. She bought sandals in Capri. She took pictures. She was more simple, less sophisticated than when she was first lady. In Italy she was only a tourist.” Jackie spoke expansively, telling Cy Sulzberger, a guest for several days, that she adored Lee, considered Bobby an “immensely ambitious” man who would never feel satisfied “until he has been elected to something, even Mayor of Hyannis Port,” and thought that astronaut John Glenn (who six months earlier had been the first American to orbit the earth in space) was “the most controlled person on earth.” Her own “highly self controlled” husband, who could “relax easily and sleep as and when he wishes,” seemed “fidgety and loose” by comparison.

  By the end of her sojourn, Jackie had been inducted as an honorary citizen of Ravello, and the Conca Dei Marini beach where they swam each day had been renamed by the town council “the Jacqueline Kennedy Beach.” She and Caroline were reunited with Jack and John Jr. (who had spent the month with his grandmother Auchincloss) on the last day of August in Newport. Still unready to return to Washington, Jackie would remain with her children at Hammersmith Farm until early October.

  Her exuberant behavior abroad sparked some carping in the American press, especially over the paparazzi pictures of her with Gianni Agnelli. “JACKIE’S BIG NIGHT IN PIRATE’S DEN,” ran a headline in New York’s Daily News on a story recounting her nightclub exploits. Katie Louchheim, by then a deputy assistant secretary of state working to promote cultural and educational programs overseas, was irked that Jackie’s behavior would reflect badly on American women. Writing to a friend, Louchheim wondered “why Mrs. Kennedy had to go get herself all this daily exposure in bathing suits and pants, and was it to keep Caroline, as she always insists, from publicity that she took this voyage?” But, overall, the coverage was adoring, and Jackie’s popularity didn’t suffer.

  Jackie knew all too well the impossibility of an “absence of tension” for her husband. His anxieties about world problems rose steadily while his wife was overseas. In early August, Kennedy had sent a message to Khrushchev through Georgi Bolshakov, Bobby’s back-channel Soviet intelligence officer, asking that the Soviet leader put the Berlin matter “on ice” until after the congressional elections in early November. When Khrushchev made no immediate reply, Kennedy prodded his aides to prepare contingency plans to meet a provocation in that strategic city—including the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons. He also asked Congress to authorize a call-up of 150,000 reservists to signal U.S. resolve to Moscow.

  In late August, Cuba finally emerged as a significant problem—three months after Khrushchev and Castro concocted their nuclear missile plan. Bobby Kennedy’s Operation Mongoose had accomplished little more than spying, and CIA chief John McCone was eager for the group to be more assertive. But during a review of Mongoose activities on August 20, Mac Bundy’s main concern was avoiding any embarrassment “if it became known the Attorney General was running dirty tricks in favor of the counterinsurgency committee, which is essentially an overseas enterprise.”

  Two days later, McCone briefed Kennedy on the cause of his concern about Cuba: an ominous influx of Soviet military materiel and personnel arriving by merchant ship. McCone was convinced that the Russians intended to build a ballistic missile base on the island. Bundy and Rusk insisted to their boss that Khrushchev would not take such a risk. Nevertheless, Kennedy asked his advisers to explore strategies for dealing with a nuclear-armed Cuba, including a blockade (“an act of war,” he noted) or invasion. “No one would desire more to see Castro thrown out of there,” Kennedy said. “But throwing Castro out of there is a major military operation.” Kennedy also requested a review of the fifteen Jupiter nuclear missiles installed in Turkey earlier in the year. “I will say that the Soviet Union exercises some restraint in some areas,” JFK reminded his advisers. “We did as I say put missiles in Turkey with nuclear warheads, and they didn’t take action.”

  On August 31 aerial reconnaissance ordered by Kennedy confirmed the presence of surface-to-air (SAM) missiles on Cuba. McCone considered these defensive weapons a mere prelude to missiles aimed at the southern United States. As Republican senator Kenneth Keating accused Kennedy of withholding information about a Cuban buildup, the President and his closest advisers worked out a statement cautioning the Soviet Union that the “gra
vest issues would arise” from any installation of offensive weapons.

  Bobby had pressed his brother to issue the warning and had pushed for tough language as well. “We’ve got the Monroe Doctrine, and they’ve spit in our eye,” Bobby sputtered. Rusk worried about “creating a kind of panic,” while Dillon advised against “making a threat.” As they debated the wording, JFK snapped at his brother, “You have to understand we’re going to have to redo this.” In the end, Rusk prevailed with softer language in the passive voice. Khrushchev responded through various messengers including Ambassador Dobrynin and back-channel man Bolshakov that the Soviet Union was only helping Cuba with its defense.

  It wasn’t until mid-September that Kennedy finally got a reply to his early-August message about Berlin. Stewart Udall had been in Moscow with his friend Robert Frost for a meeting with Russian poets when Khrushchev summoned both men to his Black Sea hideaway. In a two-hour discussion with Udall, Khrushchev revived his menacing ultimatum to “go to war or sign a peace treaty. . . . We will not allow your troops to be in Berlin.” But, he added, “we won’t do anything until November.” Frost also had a long conversation with the Soviet leader. Speaking to reporters afterwards, the eighty-eight-year-old poet recounted that Khrushchev said Americans “were too liberal to fight.” It was a statement JFK considered so unforgivable he would sever his relationship with the man whose words had helped set the tone for the Kennedy presidency.