Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  In a meeting with a group of national leaders before his departure, “when the civil rights riots were at their height and passions were flaring,” recalled James Reston, Kennedy “tolled off the problems that beset him on every side.” Then, “to the astonishment of everyone there,” the President pulled a paper from his pocket and concluded by reading from Blanche of Spain’s speech in King John:

  The sun’s o’ercast with blood

  Fair day, adieu!

  Which is the side that I must go withal?

  I am with both. Each army hath a hand,

  And in their rage, I having hold of both

  They whirl asunder and dismember me.

  Reston later wondered if Kennedy had felt “a premonition of tragedy—that he who had set out to temper the contrary violences of our national life would be their victim.” Yet Shakespeare’s play had a larger meaning that resonated in JFK’s case by dramatizing the undoing of a great king by personal weakness. “More than anything else,” wrote critic Irving Ribner, Shakespeare sought to affirm “the inseparability of public and private virtue, that only a good man can be a good king.”

  Kennedy managed to transform his European trip into great political theater. His visit to Berlin on June 26 drew 1.5 million out of the city’s population of 2.2 million—Kennedy’s biggest crowd ever. After showing palpable revulsion when he first caught sight of the wall, he stood before the Berlin City Hall and spoke resoundingly of freedom’s power in the face of communism—an almost taunting tone that threatened to undermine his Peace Speech overture. “Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect,” he said. “But we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in.” To those who doubted the superiority of democracy over communism, he incanted, “Lass sie nach Berlin kommen! Let them come to Berlin,” adding, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’”

  The sentiment was pure Kennedy, and Bundy had given him the German translation. “There we were on the goddamn airplane coming down on Berlin while he repeated the phrase over and over again,” Bundy recalled. It turned out that Bundy’s locution could also have meant “I am a doughnut,” which has prompted teasing from historians who have pointed out that Kennedy should have said, “Ich bin Berliner.”

  But the Berliners didn’t care and responded with roars of approval. Dean Rusk told David Bruce that Kennedy’s reception was “the most remarkable spectacle he ever saw.” Back at the White House, Jackie and Robert McNamara sat together on the second floor and watched a replay of the speech on television. It was her last night in Washington, and McNamara had invited her to dinner at Georgetown’s Salle du Bois restaurant. “She and I were talking about his speaking,” McNamara said. Jackie described how much her husband had improved his performance as an orator, and she gave McNamara a film of JFK during the 1950s so that he could see the difference for himself. “I was almost embarrassed to watch it,” McNamara recalled.

  Kennedy’s next three days in Ireland offered drama on a more personal scale, with visits to relatives in New Ross and his modest “ancestral homestead” in Dunganstown, as well as an elegant garden party at the residence of Irish president Eamon de Valera. “I imagine that he was never easier, happier, more involved and detached, more completely himself” than during this “blissful interlude of homecoming,” Schlesinger wrote. In his exuberance, Kennedy was also incautious: climbing out of his car and “letting two flanks of people mob him, almost crush him except for elbowing frantic Secret Service,” recalled Democratic party official Matt McCloskey.

  JFK had specifically invited all his staff members of Irish descent to accompany him, along with Jean, Eunice, Lee Radziwill, and Lem Billings. After touring the countryside, he bolted into the American Embassy in Dublin and ran up the stairs to greet Lee. “They love me in Ireland!” he exclaimed. “It was so wonderful,” recalled Barbara Gamarekian, who witnessed the scene. “Such a joyful free spirited thing to do, running up the staircase. I had never seen him like that.” To Kennedy family friend Dorothy Tubridy he said, “These were the three happiest days I’ve ever spent in my life.”

  Even so, JFK could not escape the shadow of his secret life back home. Left behind in Washington, Mimi Beardsley, now twenty and back for a second summer internship after her sophomore year, became upset when the woman in charge of the press office, Helen Gans, refused to give her the day off. Beardsley tearfully called Kennedy at the American Embassy, raising suspicions among the presidential traveling party in Dublin. “Dave Powers came up to Pierre and told him the President was just furious!” recalled Gamarekian. “If the President were back in Washington, Dave said, Helen Gans would be fired this very instant . . . I thought it was utterly asinine to think that [JFK] would get upset about a little girl in the office . . . Obviously she did have sort of a special relationship with the President . . . To be able to place a call through the White House switchboard to Ireland from the United States and to get through directly to the President to make her complaint was a little unusual.”

  On a cold and windy day, Kennedy left Ireland promising to “see old Shannon’s face again,” and flew to England, where he touched down briefly at Chatsworth to visit the grave of his sister Kathleen. The Devonshires’ chauffeur drove the President to the churchyard down the road from their grand house. For two minutes JFK gazed at the simple thin headstone adorned on top with scrolls and inscribed, “Joy she gave. Joy she found.”

  At Birch Grove, Kennedy held lengthy private meetings with Macmillan that yielded no fresh ideas or strategies. The two men effectively interred the already moribund multinational nuclear force, and they agreed, as Macmillan put it, to go “full steam ahead with Moscow talks.” Macmillan was pleased to see that Kennedy showed “a greater degree of authority,” and his staff a “lesser tendency . . . to try to impose their views upon him.”

  The meetings resembled “a country house party” rather than “a grave international conference,” recalled Macmillan. He judged Kennedy to be in “the highest of spirits,” his humor “puckish,” his mood “mischievous.” Macmillan had also glimpsed Kennedy’s physical infirmities: “very puffed up, very unhealthy,” the prime minister recalled, noting that “he suffered agony” with his back problems—the sprint upstairs in Dublin notwithstanding.

  Yet Kennedy evidently had pleasure in mind for his stopover on Sunday, June 30, near the Italian resort town of Bellagio following his late afternoon departure from Birch Grove. At Kennedy’s request, Dean Rusk had secured overnight accommodations at the Villa Serbelloni, a splendid seventeenth-century retreat for scholars tucked into a hillside overlooking Lake Como and distant alpine peaks. The villa was run by Rusk’s former employer, the Rockefeller Foundation, and it offered a notably secluded setting, surrounded by fifty acres of terraced gardens, grottos, and woodlands crisscrossed with gravel paths. The press plane was dispatched to Rome, and Kennedy was accompanied only by Powers, O’Donnell, and a Secret Service detail.

  In the early evening, Kennedy “made an unscheduled 10 minute automobile trip through the village for a quick look at Lake Como,” the Washington Post reported. “Shopkeepers, tourists, and townsmen applauded, cheered and ran after the car. . . . He was then driven back to the villa where he dined quietly with his staff.”

  Rusk told biographer Richard Reeves that Kennedy had demanded that the villa’s resident director as well as support staff move out to ensure complete privacy. The reason, according to Rusk, was a rendezvous Kennedy had planned with Marella Agnelli, who lived 125 miles away in Turin. Asked about the tale thirty-nine years later, she would only say, “Maybe yes, maybe no. It is impossible to say. . . . I am an old grandmother, and Gianni and I are still together very much.” Her friend Countess Marina Cicogna said she had a “small suspicion” that a “brief encounter” took place at Lake Como. “A couple of times Marella said something specific about Kennedy that way,” recalled Cicogna. �
�So I wouldn’t rule it out.”

  In Rome the following night, Italian president Antonio Segni honored Kennedy with a dinner at the Quirinal Palace that Gianni and Marella Agnelli attended. The trip wound down after an audience with Pope Paul VI, an old friend of the Kennedy family whose coronation had taken place only the day before JFK’s arrival. At Kennedy’s urging, Lem Billings spent a frantic ninety minutes scouring Roman antique shops for ancient busts, statues, and jewelry that Kennedy bought for himself, Jackie, Billings, and connoisseurs such as Mary Lasker. For his Oval Office desk, Kennedy chose a small 500 B.C. figure of Herakles and the Skin of a Lion, and for Jackie he selected a Roman imperial head of a young satyr.

  Kennedy’s send-off in Naples produced “more passionate excitement than even in Berlin,” noted Angie Duke. “Women absolutely threw themselves—were projected over the crowd to try and get at the President.” JFK slept most of the way home, although at one point during the night he joined Jean Smith, Pierre Salinger, and Angie Duke for a drink and “kidded about it all. . . . The President had a dry manner, and he was not given to self-delusion,” recalled Duke.

  The President had a full schedule in the White House the next day: meeting with his cabinet for two hours, writing and recording a brief TV address reporting on his trip, and conferring with his top foreign policy advisers. After a seven-minute stroll on the South Lawn, and a swim, he went upstairs for an evening with Mary Meyer.

  In the summer of 1963, Meyer had come to the rescue, ironically enough, of Helen Chavchavadze, who was pulling herself together after leaving Sibley Hospital. Chavchavadze still felt the burden of her secret liaison with Kennedy. “The double life is not in my nature,” she recalled. “I told Mary about my thing with Jack. Nobody else knew about it.” Meyer replied that “he had made a move in her direction, and she had been tempted for historical reasons but hadn’t done it.” If Mary Meyer was upset by Chavchavadze’s revelation, she didn’t show it. “In 1963 she was guarding her secret carefully,” said Chavchavadze.

  JFK gave no indication of difficulty juggling his various assignations; his mood was remarkably insouciant. Mimi Beardsley was sharing a house that summer in Georgetown with two Wheaton classmates and Farmington alumnae, Marnie Stewart and Wendy Taylor. Neither had any idea of Beardsley’s involvement with Kennedy.

  When Dave Powers inveigled the three interns to take a swim in the White House pool in July, Taylor was stunned when Kennedy arrived unannounced. After they had chatted while swimming and sipping wine, Kennedy “called for some minion who brought down a big box of fur pelts,” Taylor recalled. Jackie had recently told Evelyn Lincoln that “the only thing she really wanted” for Christmas was an expensive fur bedspread. Kennedy took the hint and turned it into a flirtatious opportunity. “I want to ask your opinion,” he told the interns. “I am having a throw made for Jackie for Christmas, and I want to know what furs you like.” The three young women dried their hands, examined the pelts of squirrel, rabbit, fox, and mink, and made their recommendations. “We thought this was very amusing,” recalled Taylor.

  By then a situation disturbingly akin to the Profumo affair threatened the President, and Bobby was working hard to stop it. The first blip on the radar had come on Saturday, June 29, with an article in Hearst’s New York Journal-American reporting that a “high elected American official” had been intimate with a prostitute named Suzy Chang, a friend of Christine Keeler’s. On Monday, July 1, while JFK was in Rome, Bobby Kennedy interrogated Dom Frasca and James Horan, the two reporters who wrote the article. They asserted that the official in question was JFK, although the FBI could find no specific evidence of such a liaison. After their confrontation with the attorney general, Frasca and Horan abandoned the story, and no other journalists followed up.

  Just two days later, J. Edgar Hoover warned Bobby more ominously that he had a report of Kennedy’s sexual involvement with twenty-seven-year-old Ellen Rometsch, a fetching brunette who had emigrated from East Germany eight years earlier and was suspected of spying for the Soviets. Married to a West German air force sergeant posted to the embassy in Washington, Rometsch appeared to be an ordinary housewife living in an affluent neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia. Her expensive lifestyle, FBI investigators concluded, “hardly could have been maintained on the pay of a German army enlisted man.”

  By night Rometsch was a call girl associated with Bobby Baker, secretary of the Senate and a longtime aide to LBJ. Among several sideline businesses, Baker ran the Quorum Club at the Carroll Arms Hotel on Capitol Hill, a “smoky and dimly lit” hideaway where congressmen and lobbyists congregated to drink and enjoy the favors of beautiful young women. Wearing a tight dress and black fishnet stockings, Rometsch worked there as “hostess” and catered to a large clientele of “importantly placed politicos” for more than two years. According to Baker, Bill Thompson had taken her to the White House several times in 1962 for assignations with JFK.

  Since the FBI had linked Rometsch to an employee at the Soviet Embassy, the Profumo-like implications of espionage and blackmail were unnerving. As with Suzy Chang, the FBI couldn’t corroborate Kennedy’s involvement with Rometsch. But the attorney general remained sufficiently concerned that he arranged to have her secretly deported to Germany in late August. JFK was strikingly cavalier about Rometsch, gossiping to Bradlee that Hoover told him she was charging senators “a couple of hundred dollars a night,” and that judging by the photo Hoover had shown him, she was “a really beautiful woman.” Yet a connection between JFK and Rometsch was every bit as dangerous as his involvement with Judith Campbell. However protected Kennedy felt by a compliant press corps, his reckless womanizing had the potential to compromise if not undo his presidency.

  Helen Chavchavadze knew nothing of either Ellen Rometsch or Judith Campbell, but she did know firsthand the unsettling disjunction between Kennedy’s private and public behavior. “It was a compulsion,” she concluded, “a quirk in his personality. He was out of control. It may have looked like beautiful convertibles and women and sophistication, but it was the shadow destroying the self. For Mary and me it was our shadow too.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Jackie celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday on Sunday, July 28, during a lively weekend house party in Hyannis Port with David and Sissie Gore, Lem Billings, Chuck Spalding, and the Radziwills. They took a three-hour cruise on the Honey Fitz and dined that evening at Brambletyde. David Gore gave Jackie a copy of The Fox in the Attic by Richard Hughes, a novel Gore found “haunting,” with a “historically accurate account of Hitler’s first Munich ‘putsch.’” Averell Harriman, the leader of Kennedy’s negotiating team in Moscow, arrived that afternoon, bearing a large jar of caviar from Khrushchev. Kennedy treated the veteran diplomat like “a conquering hero,” said Gore.

  In the sunshine and sea breezes of Cape Cod, Kennedy couldn’t have appeared more carefree that July. After a hiatus of two years he had resumed playing golf, and he was out on the course every weekend. He usually played only five holes, occasionally managing nine. Two hours was all he could endure. With Lem Billings, JFK flew kites and sailed a three-foot model schooner that Italian president Segni had sent to John Jr. On the weekend after his return from Europe, Kennedy forced family and friends to view three newsreels of the trip. “He was watching the Berlin speech, and he started clapping,” Jim Reed recalled. “He was not being egotistical. He was transported outside himself to the movie image.”

  Jackie was equally radiant, relaxing with her children on the beach in front of Teddy and Joan’s house and taking Caroline to riding lessons at a stable in Osterville. In the tranquility of Brambletyde, Jackie read from her pile of books, including Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Civilization of Rome by Pierre Grimal, painted at her easel on the second-floor sun porch overlooking the ocean, and tended to her correspondence.

  She continued to send instructions to the Curator’s Office as well as her East Wing staff. Nancy Tuckerman had moved into an apartment at 2500 Q Street in Georgeto
wn, several blocks from the new Auchincloss home. Tuckerman’s office, a center of “tiptoe diplomacy,” featured a painting of Jackie, an orchid on the coffee table, copies of Larousse Gastronomique, a Betty Crocker cookbook, stacks of menus and magazines, and somewhat incongruously, a voodoo doll similar to one displayed on Ted Sorensen’s desk.

  Although Jackie didn’t plan any official appearances for many months, she was nevertheless immersed in the details of a state dinner for the king of Afghanistan on September 5 to be hosted by Jack and Eunice. Jackie’s ability to create a grand tableau for official visitors was now firmly established. Earlier in her tenure she had displayed her directorial talent when she installed a big square mirror in the front hall of the White House. “On a state evening when the color guard and procession are reflected in the mirror,” she wrote to Harry du Pont, “many more people can see the ceremonies.” More recently, she had told White House photographer Cecil Stoughton, “Don’t make pictures of Jack and me. Make pictures of what we are looking at and what we are doing.” After watching Stoughton’s film of JFK’s European trip, she had told the lensman to move closer to the presidential car “to capture the emotion on the faces of the people as the President passed.”

  Jackie also kept in touch with Bill Walton. While Arthur Schlesinger remained the “keeper of the intellectual tone of the White House,” Walton had become chairman of the Fine Arts Commission. His task, in JFK’s words, was to make Washington “a more beautiful and functional city.” “How lovely to have you there to cope with all these charming little details,” Jackie wrote to Walton in late July with her ideas for new guard boxes outside the White House: “the most classical and simple” design “so we won’t be getting Lever Brothers ones some day”—doubtless a reference to the highly modernist Lever House office building on Park Avenue with its facade of green glass and stainless steel.