Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  The next day, JFK’s gastroenterologist, Dr. Russell Boles, prescribed an anti-psychotic drug called Stelazine. Kennedy took two one-milligram tablets that Tuesday, and two more doses on Wednesday. His mood rebounded quickly, and Kennedy stopped the medication. By Thursday evening at dinner, Ken Galbraith found Kennedy to be “tanned and brisk and in the best of form. Talk was varied and gay.”

  Jackie showed periodic evidence of tension as well. Before her speech at a fundraising benefit for the National Cultural Center at the end of November, Arthur Goldberg noticed that “she was trembling.” Despite her numerous appearances as first lady, Goldberg concluded that she was “scared to death” of crowds. “These people adore you,” he told her. “All they want is a chance to meet you.” Two weeks later as she left the White House for the Christmas holidays in Palm Beach, Jackie had tears in her eyes when she said goodbye to her secretary, Mary Gallagher.

  Staff as well as friends detected heightened friction between Jack and Jackie over money. At dinner with the Bradlees in mid-November, the First Couple openly squabbled about her $40,000 (the equivalent of $240,000 today) in department store bills that he had been “boiling” about all day. While Jackie was scrupulous about getting good prices for the White House restoration project, she had been personally extravagant since adolescence. Even her indulgent father had frequently criticized her spendthrift habits, enumerating her expenses at Bloomingdale’s and Saks, pleading with her to think twice before buying something she didn’t need.

  The residue of her “poor relation” status in the Auchincloss family was an impulse to spend lavishly on herself whenever she had the opportunity. “She didn’t shop all the time,” said Tony Bradlee, “but whatever she got was expensive, and Jack thought so too.” Jackie had a weakness for costly clothes, antiques, and paintings. “If Jackie liked something, she ordered it and coped with the bills later,” according to Mary Gallagher.

  While the Ambassador paid for her Oleg Cassini wardrobe, Jackie bought European clothing surreptitiously through “clothing scouts”—Lee in London, Letizia Mowinckel in Paris, Irene Galitzine in Rome, and a friend named Molly MacAdoo in New York. Jackie had “art scouts” as well in Manhattan and London. In the autumn of 1962, Jackie splurged on a custom-made black double-breasted mink coat that even her husband admitted was “terrific.”

  But by the end of his second year in office, Jack said her habits were getting out of hand. In 1962, Jackie’s spending had climbed to $121,461 ($750,000 in current dollars, or $60,000 a month), an increase of 15 percent over the previous year—and more than JFK’s annual presidential salary of $100,000, all of which he gave to charities such as the United Negro College Fund, National Association for Retarded Children, and the Boy Scouts. With trust funds worth an estimated $10 million (some $60 million today) Kennedy could certainly afford Jackie’s purchases, but he was careful with money and disliked the appearance of financial excess.

  As she had many times before, Jackie promised to economize, and Jack backed off. Whether out of guilt or indulgence, Jack invariably “would agree with almost anything to please her,” said Gallagher. Lem Billings believed that Kennedy was simply trying to prevent Jackie from sulking, which he couldn’t bear. For Christmas JFK bought his wife a drawing of two nude women by Renoir and a painting by Maurice Prendergast. Jackie’s gift to Jack would be a piece of scrimshaw etched with the presidential seal by artist Milton Delano, who spent 240 hours carving and polishing the sperm whale’s tooth.

  For all the strains of the preceding months, the latter part of 1962 signaled new beginnings for Jack and Jackie. On weekends they excitedly showed various intimates—Charley and Martha, Lee, Lem, and Bunny—the progress of their Virginia country house even as the costs continued to climb. And within weeks of Caroline’s fifth birthday and John Jr.’s second at the end of November, Jack and Jackie conceived another child.

  It was only a matter of time before a comedian sent up the Kennedys for a national audience. The First Family, a phonograph album by twenty-six-year-old impersonator Vaughn Meader, was a runaway hit by the year’s end. In a series of skits, Meader and an ensemble of players captured such family mannerisms as Jackie’s whispery voice and Jack’s broad Bostonian accent (“you drive a haaaad baaagain”), as well as Kennedyesque foibles (“Good night, Jackie; Good night, Bobby; Good night, Ethel . . .”). Jackie took a dim view of the album, objecting to its cover photograph of the fake presidential family in front of the White House as one of the comedian’s “cheap jokes.” Jack quite enjoyed the mockery, laughing about various sketches over dinner with the Bradlees.

  Kennedy himself remained the master of self-deflating humor. When a reporter queried him that December about his surge of interest in the performing arts (he and Jackie had recently ventured out to performances of the Bolshoi and American Ballet Theatre, as well as a French farce at the American National Theatre), JFK deadpanned that his support was modest compared to that of leaders in the past. Pressed for an example, he mentioned Louis XIV, who entertained his courtiers in the seventeenth century by wearing brightly colored tights and flying across the stage in a production called Furious Roland.

  Turning to more somber matters, Kennedy sat down on Saturday, December 15, in the Oval Office for an unprecedented interview with correspondents from all three television networks for broadcast two nights later. While noting that the superpowers were “far out of contact” before the missile crisis, making no mention of the still-secret correspondence with Khrushchev, Kennedy expressed cautious optimism that a “long period of peace” could result if Khrushchev “would concern himself with the real interests of the people of the Soviet Union.”

  JFK also briefly mentioned his opposition to Skybolt, a long-range nuclear missile that could be launched from the wing of a jet. Within days, that seemingly benign reference erupted into a full-blown crisis that imperiled the government of Harold Macmillan and threatened Kennedy’s relationship with his closest ally. The United States and Britain had invested some $375 million (out of a projected $2.5 billion) to develop Skybolt, which turned out to have numerous technical problems. With a tin ear for political implications, Bob McNamara decided to scrap the missile to save money and move on to more modern and reliable weapons.

  For the United States, Skybolt was only one among a range of nuclear armaments, but Britain was counting on the missile as its sole strategic deterrent—a symbol of its prestige as a nuclear power. Losing such an essential element of its foreign policy posed what Macmillan biographer Alistair Horne called potentially “lethal damage” to the conservative government.

  With a long-scheduled conference in Nassau between Kennedy and Macmillan set to begin on December 19, the President hastily summoned his advisers for two days of marathon meetings to solve the problem. David Bruce responded to the “urgent summons” by arriving “in tweeds and muddy jodhpur boots” to find McNamara, Gilpatric, Ball, Bundy, and others in Kennedy’s “admirably furnished” Treaty Room.

  They decided to offer the Polaris missile instead, which was actually a better weapon—with a range twice the distance of Skybolt—at a lower cost. But the missile could be fired only from the new American Polaris submarine, a vessel that would take years for the British to build. The quid pro quo for the deal would be a willingness by Britain to join in a multilateral sea-based nuclear force (MLF) using sailors from NATO countries but giving full control over the weapons to the United States. The purpose would be to check nuclear proliferation by urging individual countries—France and Britain in particular—to scrap their own independent nuclear capability. In that spirit, the United States would offer the Polaris missile on the same basis to France.

  All parties arrived in Nassau on Tuesday, December 18. The aides were assigned rooms in the exclusive Lyford Cay Club, while Macmillan and JFK each had a luxurious villa. The atmosphere was tense for nearly two days of talks until Kennedy and Macmillan agreed on terms. David Bruce observed that JFK was “acute, quick and comprehensive,
” with an ability “to catch every slip or specious argument.” By contrast, Macmillan was “almost hesitant at times in speech, at others eloquent, sentimental and where he wishes steely.” Ultimately the tight bonds of the “special relationship” prevailed. The outcome, David Gore wrote, was “a compromise which I feel sure no other ally of the U.S. could have achieved.”

  When Kennedy was leaving Nassau on Friday afternoon, Mimi Beardsley quite literally popped up again. “As the entourage of cars pulled up in front of the house to pick up the President,” Barbara Gamarekian recalled, Pierre Salinger and his aide Chris Camp “saw the top of a little head over the door” and “thought there was a little child sitting in the front seat of the car. Chris said to Pierre, ‘Who could that child be?’ and they walked over and looked in the car, and here seated on the floor was Mimi! She was sitting on the floor of a car so she wouldn’t be seen by anyone. She’d been [in Nassau], apparently for several days. They took one look and sort of backed away and didn’t say anything.”

  It turned out that Kennedy had also asked Enüd Sztanko to accompany him on the trip. “What in heaven’s name would I do in Nassau?” Sztanko exclaimed. “He got embarrassed,” she recalled. “He said, ‘I’d like to have you along and see you and talk to you.’” She told him the idea was “foolish for him because it would be noticed.”

  Kennedy arrived at the Paul estate in Palm Beach to join Jackie and the children for more than two weeks of relaxation leavened by meetings with his advisers. Besides the daily cruises on the Honey Fitz, the President enjoyed poolside manicures, shopping on Worth Avenue, and sketching sessions with Elaine de Kooning for a portrait to hang in the Truman Library. Unlike the gray soggy weather of their Christmas holiday the previous year, the days were warm and brilliantly sunny. Billings was a constant presence, along with the Radziwills, Gores, and Agnellis, who were staying with the Wrightsmans. One day the Honey Fitz voyaged up the inland waterway to Lantana for a lunch at the Vanderbilt estate that included George Plimpton, Leland and Pamela Hayward, and Loel and Gloria Guinness.

  Hervé and Nicole Alphand came aboard for an afternoon cruise on Saturday the twenty-ninth, in part because the French ambassador wanted to discuss the Polaris offer. The Frenchman immediately observed Kennedy’s “peculiar little white corset,” noting that he “got dressed with difficulty.” At the beginning, Nicole joked with the President in the rear of the yacht while Hervé spoke French with Lee. During lunch, Hervé sat next to Kennedy and talked to him throughout the meal. The President “was very agitated, always preoccupied by a new thought, sometimes phoning, sometimes asking the most diverse questions on all subjects,” Alphand noted in his diary.

  One reason for Kennedy’s excitement may have been the event he had attended that morning. With Jackie, Lem, the Radziwills, Pat, and Eunice, he had flown by helicopter to the Orange Bowl in Miami Beach. There he addressed 50,000 Cubans to welcome the arrival of 1,113 veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion who had just been released from prison by Castro. Departing from his prepared text, Kennedy told the crowd that the United States would neither impose a regime on Cuba nor return the island to its former status—in essence affirming his earlier pledge not to invade. Jackie pleased the crowd by giving brief remarks in Spanish.

  The price for the prisoners’ freedom was $53 million worth of drugs, baby food, and medical equipment that Bobby Kennedy had organized through New York attorney James B. Donovan. Jack had approved a ransom made more palatable in goods than cash, although he emphasized that the donations came from “private committees.” Still, Bobby and his men “all but ordered drug and chemical companies to kick in with ‘donations’ of their own products,” Time wrote. Their reward came in tax deductions and anti-trust exemptions.

  The Wrightsmans threw their annual New Year’s Eve bash for the Kennedy crowd. “You knew from the moment you walked into their orchid-filled house that everything was going to be perfect and delicious,” recalled Lee Radziwill. Salinger was on the guest list, and so was Ted Sorensen, one of the few occasions that Kennedy invited his dour aide to a social event. Sorensen left shortly after midnight—hours before the party broke up. “I don’t know that my social skills were as highly developed as they should have been,” Sorensen recalled. “I would not have been altogether comfortable in those circles. It was discomfort, not awe.”

  Jack and Jackie stayed until 3:40 a.m. While nothing appeared in the newspapers about the party, Hugh Sidey took note of the generally licentious atmosphere and sent a titillating off-the-record memo to his bosses in New York. “Not since the fall of Rome has there been such a scene,” Sidey began. He went on to describe Salinger “in the bushes breathing heavily” with a married woman, and to recount the disappearance of Andy Hatcher (father of seven) to Jamaica with some models. Sidey even joked that one journalist had been assigned to be Rose Kennedy’s “gigolo.” “It was a paragraph,” said Sidey, “tongue in cheek.”

  A couple of months later, Bobby got a copy of the memo and braced Sidey about it. “He was shaking he was so angry,” said Sidey. RFK zeroed in on the innuendo about his mother, for which Sidey promptly apologized. But the Time man was unrepentant about the rest. “I didn’t make this up,” he told Bobby. “This was what was going on, and it was not a pretty picture.”

  After only two years, the Kennedy administration had suffered a large number of marital casualties. Couples like Arthur and Marian Schlesinger remained together, but with increasingly visible fissures. Marian became accustomed to being left “more or less at the front door” during Washington parties. “Arthur is not one of my favorites,” Katie Louchheim wrote in her journal. “Rumor has it he is mean to [Marian] and outdances [sic] the pretty ladies around while she lingers forgotten—a ‘lech’ they say.” Marian kept her equilibrium—“a natural, winning person,” in Louchheim’s view. “I didn’t mind,” said Marian. “I’m rather a voyeur. I like to watch the passing show. . . . The time had an anything goes quality, and Arthur was drawn to power and glamour.”

  Salinger’s antics were most well known, and his wife, Nancy, was the most long suffering. During the missile crisis he had moved into the Claridge Hotel near the White House. “He was in the hotel with a French reporter,” recalled Barbara Gamarekian. “I had two numbers at the hotel where I could reach him. Pierre wasn’t discreet about any of it. Pierre had a lot of liaisons.”

  That autumn Jewel Reed had returned with her family to western Massachusetts, and Chuck Spalding had moved to Bedford, New York, leaving Betty and the six children in Greenwich. The Spaldings showed up together at the dinner dance for James Gavin, but that was an exception. “Without the White House, Chuck and Betty’s marriage would have gone on,” said Betty’s friend Nancy Coleman. “Chuck being caught up in the power web changed everything.”

  Betty turned bitter, and her problems with Chuck “colored her view” of Kennedy and the White House, according to Coleman. “She saw such a weakness with the men. It was like Louis XIV and his court.” Chuck’s “White House fever” reached delirium when he made a play for Lee Radziwill. “She said, ‘You must be kidding,’” recalled Charley Bartlett. “The whole thing was so irrational.”

  Lee’s marriage had been precarious for more than a year. Time had inadvertently hit a nerve in September 1962 with a cheeky profile of Stas and Lee called “Unhitching Post.” The magazine impudently described the connubial merry-go-round that led to the Radziwill marriage—a portrayal so infuriating to JFK that he summoned Harry Luce to the Oval Office for a dressing-down. “The President was bitter as he pointed out the hurt feelings that would be caused by this story,” Luce recalled. When the Time Inc. chief emerged from the White House, he said to Sidey, “I think I need a drink.”

  In fact Lee had increasingly been going her own way. Besides frequently traveling between London and the United States, she had been writing articles for McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal about style and fashion. (Her coverage of Parisian couture shows was a bonus for Jackie, who go
t an early glimpse of the latest trends.) Lee had also been looking for romance outside her marriage. Marella Agnelli described Lee’s Ravello companion Sandro D’Urso as “a little flirtation and friendship.” In 1963, Lee would begin an affair with controversial Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis. His vast wealth was alluring to Lee, but she was equally intrigued by his odd combination of magnetism and ugliness.

  Ted Sorensen’s marriage crumbled in the Kennedy years as well. Sorensen may have worked harder than anyone else in the White House, routinely putting in twenty-hour days. When Tish Baldrige teased him once about his punishing habits, he gravely told her that “frankly there wasn’t anything he would rather be doing.” That commitment contributed to his ulcers as well as wrenching back pain. Tom Sorensen, who worked in the State Department, told Hugh Sidey he feared his brother would collapse from exhaustion because he was “ill half the time.”

  With three rambunctious sons under ten years old, Ted’s wife, Camilla, had little time for socializing. Only months into the Kennedy administration Ted and Camilla were estranged. Sorensen’s friend Katie Louchheim noted that he was “a genius,” but “not a fond husband type.” Before long Ted was showing up at dinner parties on his own, and then with a string of women. “Sorensen, [James] Rowe reports, has an 18-year-old girl and Pierre is on the loose,” Louchheim recorded in her journal in January 1963. “Well, if they will lower the age limit for the power set, these things will happen.”

  Sorensen’s dates included a young Englishwoman (“shy with perspiring palms”), a budding society columnist named Cissie Miller (“a winning blonde who stood too tall”), and future feminist writer Gloria Steinem. But even Sorensen’s favorite, a petite woman with vivid blue eyes named Sally Elberry, got fed up and moved to Boston. “He never lets me feel he cares,” she told Louchheim. “I was lonely in Washington.”