Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Early in 1963, Camilla fled to Nebraska with the boys, and a divorce followed in October. “It was very sad to have a family splinter and children move away,” Sorensen said. “It was very sad, but I don’t regret what I did for Jack Kennedy.”

  JFK had only a vague notion of Sorensen’s travails. “He apologized once,” Sorensen recalled. “I said, ‘It is not your fault.’ He lumped me with Chuck Spalding. I knew nothing about Chuck Spalding’s marriage. I said, ‘There is nothing for you to apologize about.’ But he did apologize. I am not easily surprised, but I suppose it was unusual for him to do that.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “I am taking the veil,” Jackie announced to Mary Gallagher on Friday, January 11. In a memo to Tish Baldrige that day, Jackie declared her intention to significantly curtail her activities as first lady and devote more time to her family. The Kennedys had returned three days earlier from their extended vacation in Palm Beach. Jackie had been there for nearly a month, and Jack for seventeen days. After endless hours of yacht cruises, snoozing, and reading in the sunshine, husband and wife were tanned and rested.

  Gallagher and White House maid Providencia Paredes suspected the pregnancy, but Jackie was determined to keep her condition a secret as long as possible. Responding to written questions from Helen Thomas, she said Caroline and John were now “at an age” where it was “important that their parents be with them as much as possible.” When Arthur Schlesinger asked Jackie about a possible White House ceremony for a new medal of science, she suggested he consult with JFK. “All I beg of you is, whatever is decided, make it stag, as I am trying to uncrowd my schedule,” she wrote.

  Scarcely a month later, on February 20, the White House announced that Tish Baldrige would leave at the end of May. Baldrige didn’t know yet that Jackie was expecting, but she understood that her forceful style no longer fit with Jackie’s plans. The White House “genius in joviality,” as David Bruce called Baldrige, had contributed enormously to Jackie’s success. At large social gatherings, Baldrige was “adept in elevating the shyest to ease,” wrote Bruce, and was “omnipresent introducing the wayfarers to the cavedwellers in a medley of tongues.” She had also earned the appreciation of West Wing operatives such as Kenny O’Donnell for the public relations value of the “social stuff” they had initially dismissed.

  By early 1963, Baldrige had endured having her “ears pinned back” by Jackie one too many times. “It was a change in the climate,” said Baldrige. “The laughing and familiarity and funny jokes stopped.” Baldrige felt overworked and underappreciated, suffered spasms in her neck and dizzy spells. Baldrige knew, she wrote later, that Jackie had begun “to resent press clips that mentioned my influence on the entertaining after dinner, on the youth concerts on the White House lawn.”

  Jackie confided to Bill Walton that her mother and Baldrige “prefer frenzy, but that’s all they have to fill their lives.” Publicly, Jackie had nothing but praise for Baldrige. “Their relationship had frayed to an extent,” said White House curator James Ketchum. “It didn’t hit a brick wall. Tish was too professional to let that happen. Jackie was too sensitive to let that happen to Tish.”

  Before Joe Kennedy’s stroke, he had said to Baldrige, “You need to learn about the business world, and to know about more than hors d’oeuvres and jewelry and whipped cream.” He gave her an open-ended job offer at his Merchandise Mart in Chicago, which she now embraced to exit the White House.

  As soon as Janet Cooper heard that Baldrige was planning to leave, she called Jackie and said, “Nancy is ripe to come and work for you.” Nancy Tuckerman had tired of her job in New York at Frew Hill Travel and was open to a new challenge. She had occasionally helped her mother, Betty, who ran a business in Manhattan planning debutante parties, but otherwise Tuckerman had no exposure to the demands of the White House social secretary. “She was the opposite of me,” Baldrige noted, “quiet, soft-spoken, not a zealot, and a person with no international diplomatic experience. Obviously Jackie welcomed a change from the overly strong dose of managing I had given her.”

  Jackie had remained in close touch with Tuckerman and had periodically invited her to White House events and Virginia getaways. Before one weekend, Tuckerman had archly asked Jackie whether she should bring blue jeans or a “cotillion ball gown.” Between their shared humor and total discretion, Jackie and Tuckerman were compatible professionally as well as personally. Jackie told Tuckerman about her pregnancy and “convinced Nancy that after her child was born, life would be quiet,” said Ketchum. “Jackie would take time off, and J. B. West would run interference.” Tuckerman could also rely on help from Anne Lincoln, whom Jackie had recently shifted from Baldrige’s assistant to chief housekeeper. “Linky” was another veteran of Park Avenue and Vassar who helped Jackie organize the household, its events, and its financial accounts. “She knows how I want cigarette boxes placed,” Jackie told West.

  Before Jackie eased into her quieter life, she had numerous prior commitments to discharge in the winter months of 1963. The night of their return from Palm Beach after the Christmas holidays, the Kennedys attended a dinner at the French Embassy in honor of André Malraux. Jackie’s favorite Frenchman had come to Washington to open the exhibit of the Mona Lisa he had promised her the previous May. Jackie wore a strapless mauve chiffon dress in Empire style designed by Cassini to evoke Empress Josephine and “show off” the First Lady’s shoulders and neckline. The preview at the National Gallery for 1,200 guests turned into a chaotic crush that shocked Malraux and angered the President.

  John Walker, the director of the gallery, wrote Kennedy an apologetic letter, and Jackie replied soothingly: “You mustn’t brood and make it worse in your mind. It was a fantastic evening. It is as Malraux said, part of the magic of the Mona Lisa, almost an evil spell. . . . So please don’t ever have a backward thought again, and just think how beautifully you have hung the picture.”

  Several days later she displayed her new mink coat at Kennedy’s State of the Union address, sitting in the gallery with her mother and Lee. Jack had invited the Bradlees to dinner afterwards with Bobby and Ethel, which prompted a flurry of concern from Jackie about ill will between Bobby and Ben. “I don’t want a fight to start,” Jackie told Evelyn Lincoln. “The President said they can get along some way,” Lincoln jotted in her diary, “so they all came.”

  That week Jack and Jackie attended the annual “inaugural salute” fundraising dinner followed by a show at the Washington Armory. The Johnsons threw an after-party at their house, and the Kennedys didn’t return to the White House until nearly 3 a.m. The next night Jackie and Lee pulled one of their schoolgirl stunts by impulsively inviting some of the gala entertainers—George Burns, Carol Channing, and Kirk Douglas—to dinner upstairs at the White House. “You girls must be crazy,” Jack told Jackie and Lee. “But I guess there isn’t anything I can do now.”

  In late January, Jackie unveiled her new Green Room as an authentic “Federal parlor” of the early nineteenth century, and her Blue Room in Monroe’s American Empire style furnished with gleaming Bellange chairs. After all the fuss the previous fall over the cream-colored walls in the Blue Room, the refurbishment drew accolades. Each room had newly stained dark walnut parquet floors, a Boudin-inspired treatment that Jackie also used to dramatic effect in the Yellow Oval Room. Hanging prominently in the Green Room was Nocturne, by James McNeill Whistler, a gift from Averell and Marie Harriman. Jackie loved the “mysterious” painting, she told the Harrimans. “Think of people seeing it generations from now,” she wrote. “It will be like seeing a Poussin (a picture from a century earlier than the one you live in) given by Talleyrand—our Talleyrand!”

  Jack and Jackie were socializing with friends outside the White House with a frequency equal to their first months in office. During January and February the Kennedys dined at Franklin and Sue Roosevelt’s, danced at Doug and Phyllis Dillon’s, and attended an elegant dinner party at Joe and Susan Mary Alsop’s for Lady Diana Cooper, the
seventy-year-old widow of British diplomat Duff Cooper—the onetime lover of Susan Mary. A former actress and one of Britain’s celebrated beauties, Lady Diana had recently published her witty memoirs.

  Despite their twenty-five-year age difference, Jack and Lady Diana were, as David Bruce put it, “mutually attracted.” She considered JFK a “vigorous animal,” and Kennedy could only exclaim, “What a woman!” after parrying with her all evening. “I found Jackie more beautiful than I had expected and a hundred times more of a personality,” Lady Diana wrote. (It helped that Jackie told Cooper she had read all her books and “remembered a lot.”) Cooper had heard rumors of Jackie’s “near-divorce mood” over JFK’s “preoccupation with anything or anybody but her,” but now the British aristocrat observed that Jackie’s manner “had turned to connubial comfort. It is said that she has the whip hand as she cares not a jot for what people say.”

  Cecil Beaton had caught the same whiff of dismissiveness in Jackie two years earlier, and her determination to go her own way had only deepened with time. “If you are in political life you must get used to people who don’t like you saying things,” she told Harry du Pont that winter. “And you must never let it upset you as life is too short.”

  While the bulk of Jackie’s restoration work was now complete, she continued to scout New York galleries and antique shops for treasures. During the first week of February, she and Lee settled into the Carlyle for some extended socializing and shopping. Their first night in town, Adlai Stevenson threw a party in Jackie’s honor. Throughout his missile crisis travails, Jackie had remained loyal to Stevenson. He saluted her friendship by putting together a glittering group that included Bill and Babe Paley, Charlotte Ford, Marietta Tree, Teddy and Nancy White, Jason Robards, Mary Lasker, George Plimpton, and the cast of Beyond the Fringe (Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore, and Alan Bennett), the satirical revue that had recently opened on Broadway after a sellout run in London.

  Jackie’s presence proved so unnerving that one guest called Teddy White “Jackie,” and Stevenson introduced Babe Paley as “Mr. Paley.” At the end of the evening, the British cast performed several sketches from the revue. The next day Jackie thanked Stevenson for an evening that “ran the gamut—comedy, drama and for me abandoned delight . . . the gayest happiest evening imaginable.” She gave her friend a picture she had drawn on the plane to New York, “with much love.”

  Later in the week Jackie and Lee had lunch with Stevenson and UN Secretary-General U Thant in the delegates’ dining room. Jackie told Stevenson that she had been fascinated by the “undercurrents and tension and excitement” of the United Nations, and that she and Lee were “dreaming of intrigues in the delegates lounge.” But Jackie also worried that the pressures of Stevenson’s job were taking a toll on his health.

  Jackie, Lee, and Stas were joined by JFK and Chuck Spalding for the weekend. They made a merry band, hiking up and down Park Avenue for lunch at Voisin and dinner at Le Pavillon, followed by a performance of Beyond the Fringe and a party at Earl and Flo Smith’s that lasted until nearly 2 a.m. On their return to Washington on Sunday, February 10, Jack and Jackie surprised onlookers by stopping their limousine at the corner of Constitution Avenue and Seventeenth Street to walk across the Ellipse to the White House.

  Jackie was at the delicate six-week mark in her pregnancy, and on Monday she slept the entire day, declining to appear for dinner and a movie that evening with Ben and Tony. (Jackie had also slept for twelve hours the previous Friday and had missed a birthday party for Adlai Stevenson.) Jack, however, was bursting with energy. Ben Bradlee noticed that in their dinner conversation Kennedy was “relaxed but scattered.” After taking his friends on a tour of the Blue and Green Rooms, Kennedy insisted on a midnight walk around the Ellipse “in the cold, pouring rain.” Noted Bradlee, “Counting all the Secret Service men, we made up a task force, but no one recognized the president.”

  Reporters speculated that Kennedy’s visible displays of vigor were linked to the “fitness fever” he had stirred up at the beginning of February by resurrecting an executive order written by Teddy Roosevelt that challenged all marine officers to march fifty miles in twenty hours. Ordinary Americans took up the call along with New Frontiersmen. On the weekend JFK was tramping around New York with Jackie, Bobby managed to march fifty miles up the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal—all the way to Camp David—while four companions dropped out from exhaustion.

  JFK could hardly be expected to follow his brother’s example. Visiting Kennedy in the White House on February 20, David Bruce noted that while the President “always looks well . . . the cortisone, or whatever drug he takes for his ailments, seems to have thickened his face to the extent that he is almost jowly, and there is a slight protrusion of his eyeballs.” Nor had Kennedy’s back problems abated. One day late that winter, Dr. Hans Kraus was summoned to the White House for a 9 p.m. appointment; the following night at dinner with Ben and Tony, Kennedy described the pain “he felt at that minute in his back” and wondered if he might prefer the intense pain of childbirth because “he thought he could stand any kind and any amount of pain, provided he knew that it would end.”

  Yet Kennedy could take vicarious pleasure in watching his friends prove themselves. During Christmas in Palm Beach he had bet Stas and Spalding $1,000 that they would be unable to finish the fifty-mile walk. (The wager would be donated to charity.) They accepted the challenge, provided they be given two months to train. Stas “looked as if he hadn’t seen a locker room for thirty years,” Ben Bradlee observed. But Stas practiced diligently every day, walking up and down Park Avenue for fifty blocks “with a look of fierce determination on his face and a stone in each hand to keep his fingers from swelling,” according to Lee.

  Kennedy scheduled the hike for the final Saturday in February during a long weekend at the Paul estate in Palm Beach. Accompanying Stas, forty-eight, and Chuck, forty-four, was Dr. Max Jacobson, who had last treated JFK at Glen Ora during the University of Mississippi crisis the previous September. In June 1962, Bobby had submitted samples of Jacobson’s serum for examination by the FBI. The analysis showed no trace of narcotics—Bobby’s principal concern—but there were evidently no tests done for amphetamines. When Bobby nevertheless cautioned Jack against the shots, the President replied, “I don’t care if it’s horse piss. It works.”

  In his unpublished memoir, Jacobson made no mention of administering shots for the fifty-mile trek, although he acknowledged giving pure oxygen to Stas every five miles when his leg muscles turned wobbly. The men set out at 2:05 a.m. on Saturday the twenty-third, with Jackie and Lee following in a station wagon stocked with orange juice for Stas and raw steak for Spalding. Jack broke away from a cruise on the Honey Fitz to check their progress at the thirty-five-mile mark in Pompano Beach. Worried that the exertion might endanger Stas’s heart, JFK told his brother-in-law he could quit, and the $1,000 would still go to charity. Stas continued the walk, marching “like an English grenadier, his bent arms swinging rhythmically.” For the last fifteen miles, Stas walked on blistered bare feet.

  They reached the finish line in Fort Lauderdale at 9:35 p.m. A limousine returned them to Palm Beach, where Kennedy hung paper medals around their necks. Jackie immortalized the event with one of her watercolors: the two men striding in profile against a green background, with plump Stas behind lanky Spalding. As a tiny joke, Stas’s visible left foot was clad not in one of his Tyrolean hiking boots, but a black tasseled loafer.

  Jackie remained in Palm Beach to rest for another week while Jack flew back to Washington with Stas and Lee. The following Sunday, Jack and Charley Bartlett spent a sunny afternoon sightseeing like a couple of eager tourists. They walked up the Mall, visited the Lincoln Memorial, hopped into the limousine, and drove to Arlington National Cemetery. They wandered among the graves and toured the Custis-Lee Mansion, the pillared home of Robert E. Lee perched on a hill with a direct sightline to the Lincoln Memorial. Jack loved the view across the river so much that he
joked, “Maybe we’d better move the White House over here.” The two men also discussed where Jack would be buried. “He said, ‘I guess I’ll have to go back to Boston,’” Bartlett recalled. “I remember arguing for the national cemetery. We left it sort of up in the air.”

  The Kennedy crowd was badly jolted early in 1963 by the mental collapse of Philip Graham, the influential president of the Washington Post. Graham had met JFK in the late 1950s through Bill Walton and had fallen hard for the young senator. Phil and Katharine Graham were fixtures on the Kennedys’ White House guest lists and joined them at Georgetown dinner parties. Phil would offer advice to Kennedy from time to time, including the suggestion shortly after JFK’s election that David Bruce would be “a strong and wise London ambassador.”

  Ben Bradlee considered Phil a “natural friend for Kennedy” because of their “shared humor, understanding of the uses and abuses of power, charm, common goals for America, and much more.” To Katharine Graham, her husband and the President were “friends of a certain kind. They were very funny with each other.” Yet Graham never became part of JFK’s inner circle. The primary reason for their lack of intimacy was Graham’s manic-depressive illness, which “cut him off terribly,” said Anne Truitt, who knew about Graham because her husband worked as his assistant.

  In his manic phases, Graham plunged into “erratic, often brilliant activity” that alternated with “debilitating depressions,” Bradlee observed. As recently as the summer of 1962, Graham had “seemed well and in balance,” Katharine later wrote. But that autumn, Kennedy had asked Graham to head COMSAT, a public/private company charged with operating communications satellites. As Graham threw himself into organizing the new company, he became “out of control, hectic, unhinged,” Arthur Schlesinger recalled. “A life enhancer became a life destroyer.”