Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Charley Bartlett escorts Evelyn Lincoln from an elevator at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to join other friends and Kennedy family members after JFK’s assassination.

  “The Washington landscape seemed to me

  to be littered with male widows.”

  Jackie flanked by Bobby and Teddy Kennedy at the Arlington National Cemetery grave site of Jack Kennedy.

  “I really believe in God, I believe in heaven, but where has God gone?”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Scarcely a week after the Emancipation Proclamation Centennial, Kennedy was forced to face the violent undercurrents of race relations in America. The trouble stemmed from the efforts of twenty-eight-year-old James Meredith to register as the first black student at the defiantly segregationist University of Mississippi. Meredith’s case had been winding through the legal system for nearly two years before a federal court ruled in his favor in September 1962. For four days in a row, starting on Tuesday, September 25, Meredith tried to register at the Ole Miss campus in Oxford and was turned back by forces directed by Governor Ross Barnett. In response, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals declared Barnett guilty of contempt.

  At that stage, JFK canceled his scheduled weekend in Newport with his family and took charge. For the next forty-eight hours, Jack and Bobby reviewed various stratagems, even giving their approval to sneaking Meredith into the registration center so Barnett could save face by claiming he had been tricked. But 2,500 segregationists armed with guns, rocks, iron spikes, and Molotov cocktails stymied the plan by encircling the Lyceum, the school’s administration building that was protected by federal marshals. (Unbeknownst to the mob, Meredith was safe in a dormitory, surrounded by armed guards.) As JFK gave a televised speech on Sunday night saying that Meredith would register unhindered the following day, a riot broke out. By the time the U.S. Army arrived near dawn on Monday morning to restore order, more than two hundred people had been injured and two men had died, including a French journalist.

  To oversee the tense situation, Kennedy gathered his closest domestic advisers—O’Donnell, O’Brien, and Sorensen, who left the hospital bed where he had been confined for a week recovering from an ulcer attack—along with Bobby and aide Burke Marshall. They shuttled between the Cabinet Room and Oval Office for more than six hours on Sunday night starting at 10:40 p.m., sustained by milk, beer, and cheese snacks served by Evelyn Lincoln.

  The atmosphere was chaotic as they communicated by telephone alternately with Barnett and Justice Department officials in the Lyceum. They heard reports of shootings and dealt with false rumors such as a bulletin from Bobby that Meredith’s dorm was under siege. “You don’t want to have a lynching!” exclaimed O’Donnell. Yet the deep camaraderie between Kennedy and his men was evident in their intermittent bursts of jocularity.

  “Where is Nick? [Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, posted inside the Lyceum] Is he up in the attic?” asked JFK amid laughter. “He’s in the pillbox,” said Sorensen. Later Kennedy chuckled and observed, “I haven’t had such an interesting time since the Bay of Pigs,” to which Bobby replied, “The Attorney General announced today he’s joining Allen Dulles at Princeton University.”

  Kennedy frequently fretted about reported injuries. “Did he break his back? Did it break his back?” JFK urgently inquired when told that a state trooper had been wounded. But despite the attacks by rioters, the President opposed a return of fire by the marshals. As the hours slipped by, Kennedy and his men grew angry over the army’s slow progress from Memphis, Tennessee, to Oxford. O’Donnell growled, “I would think they’d be on that fucking plane in about five minutes. . . . I have a hunch that Khrushchev would get those troops in faster.” Yet moments later, O’Donnell had the group laughing when he told a story about a Boston Post reporter calling the governor to say, “Your daughter’s car has been found cracked up on the Cape. Do you have any statement?” “Certainly,” the governor replied. “The thief must be apprehended.”

  Although Kennedy was often exasperated, he and his men maintained a calm detachment. “If you ever made a chronological listing of the reports we’ve gotten over that phone in the last three hours, it wouldn’t make any sense at all,” said Sorensen shortly before 2 a.m. Yet Kennedy paid no political penalty either for the mayhem in Mississippi or the federal government’s miscues and haphazard response. The evening after the all-night ordeal, Kennedy was relaxed enough to entertain Mary Meyer and Bill Thompson for dinner. With the protection of some five thousand national guardsmen and soldiers, James Meredith enrolled at Ole Miss, and the crisis was soon overtaken by world events.

  The First Lady, Caroline, and John finally came home on Tuesday, October 9. In the aftermath of an eight-part Washington Post series on her White House restoration project in September, Jackie faced some unanticipated challenges in pursuing her plans. The series by Maxine Cheshire had hit within days of Jackie’s return from Ravello. It was filled with praise for her effort to “transform the White House into a dazzling showcase of Americana.” Cheshire emphasized Jackie’s reputation as a “terrible tightwad” with taxpayer money, and her skill in raising an unprecedented hundreds of thousands through her “soft sell” with private donors. Yet Cheshire also highlighted the extravagance of some expenditures—“$28,000 [$166,000 today] for weaving special gold and magenta fabrics in an exclusive design” for the Red Room.

  The worst part was Cheshire’s revelation that a much praised Baltimore desk in the Green Room was a fake—a disclosure that embarrassed its donor, Mrs. Maurice Noun of Des Moines, Iowa, as well as Jackie, who had singled out the desk during her televised tour. The Post series also unmasked the secret role of the “mustached and dapper” Stéphane Boudin, and the shopping expeditions in France by Jayne Wrightsman. Cheshire predicted that under Boudin’s influence, the Green Room would become chartreuse and the Blue Room’s walls a white striped silk—“Boudin’s Boudoir,” in Harry du Pont’s words. She described the effort to evoke Malmaison in the Red Room even as the White House sought to “play down the French influence in the White House today.” The notion of such a dominant role for a non-American designer using European furniture, fabric, and objects offered opportunities for mischief to Kennedy’s political opponents.

  The series caught Jackie completely off guard. Cheshire usually wrote favorably about the Kennedy administration, but like other “newshens” covering the East Wing, she met with undisguised disdain from Jackie. Once, when liberal columnist Doris Fleeson appeared at a White House luncheon for women journalists, Jackie said, “Oh, Doris, what in the world would you be doing here with these others?” in a voice audible to all the “others” nearby in the receiving line. Laura Bergquist recalled that Jackie “wouldn’t even recognize [the] existence” of Helen Thomas and Frances Lewine, the famous “harpies” in Jackie’s journalistic demonology.

  From the deck of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. during the America’s Cup, Jackie had scrawled a twelve-page letter of “seething indignation” to Harry du Pont about the Cheshire series. “If you were appalled,” wrote Jackie, “multiply your reaction by 1,000,000 & you will have mine.” Jackie viewed Cheshire as clever but one of the “more malicious of the charming female press who do so much to make the children and my lives a pleasure.” JFK had been incensed about the Baltimore desk in particular: “He told Bill Elder that it was criminal to have let Mrs. Noun be placed in such a humiliating position.” Jackie declined to blame Elder, a “diligent, dedicated & un-temperamental man—a joy to have as curator.” (Elder had been appointed after the resignation of Lorraine Pearce at the end of the summer.) His only failing was inexperience and naÏveté “about the fierce white light that is always trained on the W. House.” Jackie’s big regret was not learning of the series soon enough to have “handled it correctly—with the Post editors.”

  Jackie fretted that if the articles were to create a political brouhaha, she would have to cease work on the Green and Blue Rooms. “Messrs Scalamandré & Jans
en will just find themselves with a lot of unused material on their hands,” she wrote, “and Maxine Cheshire can just have that on her conscience the rest of her life.” The lesson, Jackie said, was that “if we are to complete something that is so important—the silence of the tomb is necessary. . . . Why are some people so avid for publicity—when it poisons everything. I hate & mistrust it & no one who has ever worked for me who liked it has been trustworthy.”

  Jackie’s alarm subsided as she engaged in skillful damage control that enabled her to proceed as planned with the restoration. She directed Pam Turnure to vet a Newsweek cover story on the restoration, excising such references as a “chartreuse” Green Room and the prospect of a white Blue Room. “The room will remain blue,” Turnure told Newsweek’s Chalmers Roberts. “No decision has been made for fabric for walls.” Months earlier Jayne Wrightsman and Jackie had indeed chosen a white on white striped silk with a blue fabric border to carry out Boudin’s idea of evoking a tent room at Malmaison.

  One particularly happy development on Jackie’s return from Newport was the arrival from Paris of a trompe l’oeil wardrobe for her dressing room. On its doors were images by turns obvious and enigmatic, designed by Boudin and painted on canvas by artist Pierre-Marie Rudelle, representing what Jackie called “mes objets adorés.” The idea for the wardrobe came late in 1961 from Bunny Mellon, who had a similar trompe l’oeil of her own life in a gallery between her greenhouses in Virginia.

  Jackie’s wardrobe featured books written by Jack (Profiles in Courage, Why England Slept, and a collection of speeches titled The Strategy of Peace); a photo of six-year-old Jackie with her father at a horse show; the Life spread of Marshall Hawkins’s picture of her flying off Bit of Irish across a fence; a nineteenth-century engraving of the White House; paintings by jeweler Fulco di Verdura and Philippe Julian; a book about the Roosevelt family; Fabergé clocks; Jackie’s sculpture of Madame de Pompadour as a sphinx; a piece of coral that Jack kept as a souvenir from his shipwreck during World War II; and Les Fleurs du mal, nineteenth-century poet Charles Baudelaire’s intensely evocative and somewhat decadent collection. In her Vogue essay at age twenty-one, Jackie had described Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde as “poets and idealists who could paint their sinfulness with honesty and still believe in something higher.”

  Jackie immediately thanked Boudin for the “miracle” he had produced. “I am flabbergasted!!!!!” she wrote, calling the wardrobe “more beautiful than all my adored objects, and I am in heaven when I am there.” She said JFK liked it so much that he wanted to move it to the Blue Room. She also professed concern that her husband would appear at her door with a visiting dignitary to see the wardrobe, “so I am always coiffed and wearing a peignoir from Worth.” As for Boudin’s Treaty Room, Jackie said JFK now preferred to sign bills and treaties in that historic setting rather than the Oval Office. She slyly added that if her husband were to move his office upstairs and “receives his visitors in my bedroom, I will tell you it will restrain him a bit.”

  With Caroline approaching her fifth birthday, her parents needed to place her in kindergarten that autumn. Jackie wanted to keep her in the White House for another year, so she created a fully professional school. The previous spring, the two preschool teachers Anne Mayfield and Jackie Marlin had decided to leave—in Marlin’s case, because she was pregnant. Marlin had told no one of her condition, so she was astonished after Easter break when the First Lady exclaimed, “Jackie, you’re pregnant!” “She saw the look on my face,” Marlin recalled. “Don’t worry,” the First Lady said, “I have a sixth sense. I can always tell when someone is pregnant.”

  To accommodate all the children of varying ages already enrolled, the First Lady hired two experienced teachers for separate nursery and kindergarten classes, enlarged the size of the school from fourteen to twenty, and expanded the schedule to five mornings a week. She also enriched the curriculum with instructors for twice-weekly lessons in music and dance.

  The two new teachers, Alice Grimes, who taught Caroline’s class, and Elizabeth Boyd, who took charge of the younger group, were typically “safe” in their backgrounds. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence (where Lee had studied briefly), Grimes had been teaching kindergarten at the Brearley School in New York. Grimes recruited Boyd, who had graduated from Farmington (where she had known Lee) and Vassar and was a kindergarten teacher at the Potomac School outside Washington.

  Jackie knew she could count on both women to keep the school’s activities and participants secret. Grimes received several press inquiries in the beginning but understood that “it was a given” to refer everything to the press office. “We were very private people,” said Boyd. “At Potomac we were taught you do not discuss your children at social occasions outside the school. In Washington you whisper, and everyone knows everything.”

  Still, before the school year began, the White House itself breached the confidentiality rule for political reasons. On the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation Centennial, the press office had announced the enrollment of the son of Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Hatcher, one of three black officials (with George Weaver in the Labor Department and Carl Rowan at the State Department) in the Kennedy administration. Five-year-old Avery, the youngest of seven Hatcher children, was meant to be an important symbol of Kennedy’s belief in integration at a particularly charged time.

  On Wednesday, October 10, only one night after Jackie’s homecoming, she and Jack gave the season’s first full-fledged dinner party, which turned into an unusual high-wire act for Jack. On the guest list were Najeeb Halaby, head of the Federal Aviation Administration, and his wife; James Truitt, now working as Phil Graham’s deputy at the Washington Post, and Anne, whom Jackie knew from the White House school; Bill Walton; architect John Warnecke; and Mary Meyer—the first time she had been part of an intimate gathering in Jackie’s presence since the Advise and Consent luncheon a year earlier.

  Walton had brought Mary (who had last seen JFK nine days earlier), but his link that evening was more with Warnecke. Since the early days after the inaugural, Walton had been working to save Lafayette Square. His initial efforts had met little success, and both he and Kennedy had resigned themselves to the destruction of the nineteenth-century homes on the square’s edge—until Jackie forcefully intervened in the spring of 1962. “The wreckers haven’t started yet,” Jackie said to the two men. “Until they do, it can be saved.” By coincidence, Red Fay brought Warnecke, a friend from San Francisco, to visit Kennedy, who asked the architect’s help with the square. Kennedy was an admirer of Warnecke, a handsome former football star at Stanford nicknamed “Rosebowl” by Fay.

  Warnecke came up with a compromise design that retained the townhouses on the east and west sides of the square, with modern brick buildings of eight to ten stories set back behind them. The scheme, in the view of Kennedy arts adviser August Heckscher, indicated the President’s “conservative taste.” It also captured Jackie’s preference for buildings neither too contemporary nor resembling “some State School for the Deaf” from the nineteenth century.

  Jackie twice found JFK and Walton on the floor working over models of the square with paper facades. But it was Jackie, Walton later said, who “played a key part. . . . She kept us at it.” As a member of the Commission of Fine Arts, Walton remained the Kennedys’ personal advocate for the project.

  Warnecke had come to town in October 1962 to unveil the plan for Lafayette Square to the press, and the White House dinner was intended to celebrate the victory for historic preservation. James Truitt was included because he had put Warnecke together with Nathaniel Owings, the architect selected by Jack Kennedy to plan another pet project, the redevelopment of the dilapidated stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue running from the White House to the Capitol.

  Yet for both Jack and Jackie, the evening came at an inconvenient moment. She was dealing with the details of her reentry, and he was more preoccupied than usual with domestic and foreign problems. At a hastily scheduled meeting with J
ohn McCone that day, the President had learned that Soviet Ilyushin-28s, bombers with a range of around 1,500 miles, were now in Cuba—the first sign of weapons with an offensive capability. Kennedy had been so rattled by the news that he had told McCone to conceal it from other members of the administration.

  Kennedy was also concerned about the coming midterm elections. Against the advice of some of his advisers, he had begun campaigning for Senate and congressional candidates. Schlesinger in particular had warned him that his prestige would suffer if the Democrats fared badly on election day—as the party in power usually did at midterm. But Kennedy was determined to push for more northern moderate Democrats to tilt the balance on Capitol Hill in his favor. To help the campaign, he had committed to speak for fifteen minutes at a rally in Baltimore that evening. As a result, he could just stay for cocktails until eight and return after dinner to join the group for coffee.

  As the guests gathered in the Yellow Oval Room, only Anne knew about Jack’s affair with Mary. Anne recalled that the two lovers were “polite and plain,” exchanging no telling glances. Standing on the Truman Balcony to see the landing of the helicopter that would transport Kennedy to Baltimore, “it was the only time I felt sheer power,” said Anne. After some pleasantries with the President, they all watched him take off from the South Lawn.

  When Kennedy returned, Anne Truitt began to feel that just being there was a mistake. “I think I was corrupt,” she recalled. “I knew the President and Mary were having an affair. I should never have put my feet under Jackie Kennedy’s table.”

  By October, Jackie had made most of her major decisions for the White House restoration. Custom silk fabrics for the Green and Blue Rooms were being woven, and the furniture and art had been acquired. She looked forward to having everything installed by mid-January.