Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  At Georgetown dinner parties, Walter Heller openly disparaged Douglas Dillon, who had clearly eclipsed him in Kennedy’s estimation. Listening to a phone conversation with Dillon during a Hyannis Port weekend, Jim Reed was struck by Kennedy’s deference: “Mr. Secretary, if you think that’s what is best under all the circumstances, that’s all right with me.” Heller couldn’t help feeling resentful and insecure, describing to friends a “typical Dillon ploy—to pin the blame on someone else.” Heller also complained that Kennedy found it “difficult to give one a boost,” and despaired over JFK’s “chilly aloofness,” even his failure to invite his economic adviser for a swim in the White House pool.

  Despite Lyndon Johnson’s energetic involvement in rallying support for a civil rights bill, he had slipped into another funk by the late summer of 1963. “Johnson had grown heavy and looked miserable,” recalled his confidant Harry McPherson. Standing in the swimming pool at The Elms with McPherson, LBJ lamented that he had no role and said he didn’t think he could remain on the ticket. “I think he really meant it,” said McPherson.

  In early September, Kennedy dispatched Johnson on a goodwill tour to Scandinavia. Before his departure, LBJ asked to confer with Kennedy in Hyannis Port. In typically high-handed fashion, O’Donnell turned down Johnson’s request, forcing the Vice President to seek access through presidential military aide Chester Clifton.

  Johnson arrived on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, and houseguest Red Fay was struck by Johnson’s apparent “uneasiness and unsureness.” When Johnson asked the President to review a proposed speech, Kennedy whipped through the pages, editing quickly. “I think it is very good,” Kennedy told Johnson. “I have crossed out a few short sections, which won’t hurt the speech but which are better unsaid.” Kennedy also vetoed Johnson’s request to add Poland to the itinerary. Afterwards, Kennedy said to Fay, “The poor guy’s got the lousiest job in government and just wants to make a significant contribution. . . . Unfortunately the timing isn’t right. Otherwise I’d love to see him go and have a little fun.”

  Ten days later JFK sent a solicitous letter to Johnson during the trip. “I am sorry to hear that you are tired,” Kennedy wrote, “and I want to be sure that you pay more attention to the doctors than you usually do. The rest of your trip is really not of comparable importance to what you have already accomplished.” Kennedy urged Johnson to “take it easy” and praised him for his “exceptionally good” work overseas. “You have shown yourself the best of our ambassadors, with leaders and with the people.”

  One of the first glimmers of Jackie’s recovery came in a letter to Bill Walton on August 27. “Dear Baron,” she wrote (along with “Czar,” one of several pet names she had for him), inquiring about the White House guard box project. She expressed her doubts about painting them green, since the sentry posts at Wexford were that color and looked like “out houses or army camouflage buildings.”

  The steady flow of praise for the restoration project helped rejuvenate Jackie as well. “The White House is all it should be—It is all I ever dreamed for it,” she wrote to Clark Clifford, her legal consultant on the project. A few items remained on her wish list, including curtains for the East Room, curtains and upholstery for the State Dining Room, and lanterns and chandeliers in the ground floor hall. “It is marvelous what we have accomplished,” she told Harry du Pont.

  By September, Jackie had already begun to focus on a new round of projects: the Kennedy Library, Harvard historian Frank Freidel’s book about the presidents as a companion to the White House guidebook, and a book of photo essays on the White House collection, along with a documentary on the same subject. Jackie even solicited her mother for ideas on the documentary.

  The most ambitious new venture was the refurbishment of Blair House and an adjoining nineteenth-century building that the federal government had acquired to expand accommodations for the President’s guests. In April, Jackie had formed a committee to preserve Blair House, but because of her pregnancy she had appointed Robin Duke, wife of protocol chief Angier Biddle Duke, to oversee the restoration. The house had been shuttered since the early summer for the installation of central air conditioning and a new kitchen.

  “Now I worry about the President’s guest house,” she wrote to Harry du Pont on September 20, lamenting its “peeling walls, wire coat hangers, stuffed furniture and a ghastly television set.” It galled Jackie that visitors to the Soviet Union “have probably just slept in gilded beds and eaten off an Ivan the Terrible gold-plated plate in the Kremlin,” only to encounter “quite shocking . . . shabby rooms” across the street from the White House. Jackie asked du Pont for his help, and said she hoped Robin Duke “has not been too efficient.” Jackie soon discovered that to the contrary, the committee had been “absolutely bogged down” because Duke “has a much nicer character than I do and is much less autocratic. . . . She lets everyone speak!”

  She also consulted with Tuckerman about White House events in the months to come. Although Jackie didn’t plan to participate until after the first of the year, there would be state dinners for Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Irish prime minister Sean Lemass, and West German chancellor Ludwig Erhard. From Brambletyde she continued to closely supervise the state dinner on September 5. Afghanistan’s King Mohammed Zahir Shah and Queen Homaira arrived during a rainstorm, and both JFK and Eunice refused to wear raincoats or hats, much less carry umbrellas, the result of “this marvelous mania for health and youth,” observed Angie Duke. “The whole official party stood there in a steady downpour,” Duke recalled. “I can still picture the King with the water dripping down his face and going into his collar. Of course the President, vigorous, youthful, magnificent, standing in the rain, was a marvelous figure.”

  Worried about the weather, Jackie called several times during the day. Although the skies cleared, she finally decided to move the dinner indoors from the Rose Garden because of the wet grass. The after-dinner entertainment proved to be spectacular. Kennedy made his own dramatic impact by requesting that the Jefferson Memorial be illuminated for the first time, so the 116 guests seated on the South Portico outside the Blue Room could see it glowing in the distance along with the Washington Monument. A marine drill organized by Jackie and Tuckerman featured some three hundred officers performing as searchlights crisscrossed their precision patterns. A fireworks finale was another White House first, prompting a flood of calls to the police from frightened citizens worried about exploding bombs.

  Jackie had been somewhat subdued during Joe Kennedy’s seventy-fifth birthday party and the tenth anniversary celebration, but she was positively giddy during her last weekend in Newport with Vivian Crespi and the Fays as houseguests. Crespi and her son Marcantonio flew with JFK on Friday, September 20, from New York. That afternoon JFK had addressed the United Nations General Assembly, making headlines by proposing a joint U.S.-Soviet trip to the moon. The evening before his speech he and Dave Powers had been at Earl and Flo Smith’s Fifth Avenue apartment until after midnight.

  Flying to Rhode Island, JFK was absorbed in his papers as Marcantonio tore around the plane. “How can you concentrate in that din?” Crespi asked. “Don’t forget,” Kennedy said, “I grew up in a family of nine children.” On Saturday everyone went swimming and boating as usual, but Jack decided to vary the routine by making a home movie. “You will have the starring role,” Kennedy said to Crespi, “and the under secretary will play your ardent suitor. All you have to do is model a bikini.” After JFK had chosen “the least conservative and most colorful,” he said to Crespi, “How is your running, kiddo?”

  With Janet and Hughdie away in Europe, and the children safely back in the house with Secret Service agent Bob Foster, Kennedy assigned the filming to naval photographer Robert Knudsen, who along with Cecil Stoughton chronicled family events under Jackie’s watchful eye. Working from a script scribbled by Fay, Kennedy, in what Chuck Spalding would later call his “Roger Vadim” role, blocked out the action: Crespi in her b
ikini being chased by Fay, wearing long boxer shorts and garters. Jackie gleefully chipped in: “Wouldn’t the rape scene be better by moonlight?” As the camera rolled, Fay and Crespi sprinted across Hammersmith’s manicured lawn while Kennedy yelled, “Crespi, give him a chance!” “We ended up horizontal in the bushes,” Crespi recalled, “with a close-up of Red Fay’s feet sticking out of Mrs. Auchincloss’s Queen Elizabeth roses.”

  The second scene had Fay getting killed, ending with him lying in a boat with ketchup splattered on his chest as Crespi, Anita Fay, Jack, and Jackie blithely stepped over him. “I was the bad guy,” Fay recalled. “The Secret Service men were in it too. They came roaring up in a car.” Crespi recalled the First Couple’s hearty laughter as well as “scratches and thorns in my poor behind.”

  To the Kennedys’ dismay, a press helicopter caught this “murder” sequence, and some publications ran stories on “presidential hijinks.” According to Fay, after JFK’s assassination, Jackie made certain that the film was locked up “so it would not get into anyone’s hands.”

  Jackie came back to Washington with her family on Monday, September 23—the first time she had been in the capital in three months. Two days later, Caroline was scheduled to start first grade. Jackie had decided to extend the White House school for one final year before sending Caroline to Stone Ridge, a private school for girls in suburban Maryland run by the nuns of the Sacred Heart, who had educated Rose Kennedy and her daughters as well as Joan and Ethel Kennedy.

  “I think Mrs. Kennedy was glad to have the privacy and quiet life for Caroline to continue as long as was practical,” recalled Alice Grimes. Jackie emphasized to Grimes, “It must be a real first grade where they learn as much as you do at Chapin or Brearley.” Grimes also placed Caroline in a catechism class at Georgetown Visitation, a nearby private Catholic girls school. Jackie was eager to have Caroline “religiously up with her 2nd grade comrades & ready to make her first communion with them.”

  The Kennedy children had become favorites around the White House. “When people spoke they listened,” noted Tish Baldrige. “They did not interrupt their elders.” Their mother “refused to allow them to feel they were privileged,” wrote Baldrige. “Jackie said over and over that she didn’t want her daughter and son to consider themselves rich or elite.”

  Only one day after Jackie returned to the White House, Jack left on a 10,000-mile five-day trip to eleven western states to talk about conservation issues—not ordinarily high on his agenda. The press nicknamed him “Smokey the Bear,” “Paul Bunyan,” and “Johnny Appleseed,” which tickled rather than irritated him. The first stop was, somewhat improbably, Milford, Pennsylvania, the site of Grey Towers. The Pinchot family had given the federal government the mansion belonging to the late uncle of Tony Bradlee and Mary Meyer, former Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot, to use for conservation studies.

  Ordinarily the gift would not have attracted presidential attention, but Kennedy wanted to see “where his friends the Pinchot girls had grown up.” Tony and Mary flew on Air Force One with the President, and then by helicopter to a pasture on the Pinchot estate. Tony noticed nothing untoward between Jack and Mary that day. “He was easy with both of us,” she recalled. “There was no sexual thing evident. I always felt he liked me as much as Mary. You could say there was a little rivalry.”

  After a perfunctory ceremony at Grey Towers, JFK made a beeline to the modest home of Tony and Mary’s mother, Ruth Pinchot, a onetime liberal free spirit who had turned ardently right wing. “Jack got in the car, and Mary and I ran alongside,” Tony said. “When we got there we showed him family pictures. He was joking and having fun.” Standing on Ruth Pinchot’s “ratty porch,” they had their pictures taken—“one of history’s most frozen shots,” Ben Bradlee recorded. “Jack loved the idea of sticking it to Ruth,” he recalled. “Her two daughters brought a Democratic president. The look on her face was as if she had something sour in her mouth. Jack was sort of teasing about the whole thing.”

  As Kennedy shuttled from state to state—Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota—he droned through what the Washington Post described as “sometimes rambling speeches” about national parks and natural resources, and the crowds gave him a tepid response. “Kennedy seemed ill at ease in this guise,” noted Time. But on September 24, the Senate ratified the limited test-ban treaty, prompting Kennedy to shift gears in Montana and start talking about the need to curb nuclear weapons and pursue international peace. He continued those themes on subsequent stops in Wyoming, Washington, Utah, Oregon, California, and Nevada.

  “It was the subtle beginning of the presidential campaign,” recalled Kennedy’s secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall. “When he began talking about peace he got a wonderful response, so he essentially stopped talking about my subject. I didn’t resent it. Ted Sorensen and his people were writing speeches, but Kennedy sensed he should say something about peace. People were aware how dangerous the world was. The first step was the test-ban treaty and talking about the importance of peace. He improvised this, and smart reporters saw this as the first theme of the ’64 campaign.”

  The last weekend of the trip Kennedy spent at Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Springs with O’Donnell and Powers. As she had on Kennedy’s previous visit to Crosby, Pat Lawford joined her brother for Sunday mass and then spent the day with him before flying to Washington Sunday evening.

  Jack Kennedy looked “ruddy” as he greeted Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie at Washington’s Union Station on Tuesday, October 1, while drumrolls and five-foot silver trumpets signaled the arrival of the seventy-one-year-old emperor’s train. Standing at JFK’s side was Jackie, making her first public appearance since Patrick’s death. She seemed “healthy and rested,” conversed in animated French with the bearded monarch and his thirty-three-year-old granddaughter, and winked at the crowd. Later in the afternoon, Jackie had tea with the royal guests, who presented her with a full-length leopard coat. “Je suis comblée! (I am overcome),” she exclaimed. She even wore her gift when she escorted Selassie to the Rose Garden. “See, Jack!” she trilled. “He brought it to me! He brought it to me!” Deadpanned Kennedy, “I had wondered why you were wearing a fur coat in the garden.”

  Afterwards Jackie watched the Joffrey Ballet rehearse its performance of a 1920s-style vaudeville dance for the evening’s white-tie dinner. When she realized that the skimpy costumes on the women might offend the African ruler, she sent Nancy Tuckerman scurrying to rent more decorous flapper skirts and tops. As the first guests were arriving, Jackie was already en route to New York, where she caught her flight to Athens.

  Once again she had her own special compartment in first class, but she was so fatigued she needed to take oxygen during the eleven-hour journey. On arrival in Athens she looked “pale and drawn,” and she was whisked to the seclusion of shipowner Marcos Nomikos’s villa overlooking the Saronic Gulf where she and Lee had stayed two years earlier.

  She instantly came close to provoking a diplomatic incident by refusing to have lunch with Greece’s King Paul and Queen Frederika. She told U.S. Ambassador Henry Labouisse she couldn’t stand the queen—an opinion he had heard eight months earlier at a White House dinner party, when she twice said, “I hate her.” He finally persuaded her to meet the monarchs for tea. She brought Lee but not Stas, because the queen “hates Stas,” the ambassador told Cy Sulzberger that evening.

  Jackie, the Radziwills, and the Roosevelts boarded the Christina on Friday, October 4, for their Aegean cruise to Istanbul. The Onassis “pleasure palace” had a crew of sixty, a dance band, and two coiffeurs from Athens. On the first night the guests dined on tongue meunière and roast beef, washed down with vintage champagne. During a visit to Smyrna on the Turkish coast, Onassis gave his guests a tour of the town where he had grown up. Jackie had permission from Onassis to direct the Christina “wherever her heart desires” through the Greek islands, fulfilling “the dream of my life,” she said.

  “Onassis was very courtly to
Jackie, who was the guest of honor,” recalled Sue Roosevelt. “He admired her, but he was not any more attentive to her than to anyone else.” Jackie, in turn, found Onassis to be “an alive and vital person.” The Roosevelts were fully aware that Lee was involved with Onassis. Stas stayed aboard for only the first few days, and during most of the cruise Jackie and Lee stuck together, doing “zany things” like putting heaps of nutmeg in Roosevelt’s soup at lunch because they heard it was a hallucinogen. “They teased him,” said Sue. “I thought they were a bit juvenile with all their giggling.” Still, it was a relief to see Jackie in an upbeat mood. Onassis pampered his guests, kept everything “on a light note,” and gave the women extravagant gifts: gold and diamond bracelets for Lee, a gold and diamond minaudière from Van Cleef & Arpels plus three gold bracelets for Sue Roosevelt, and a diamond and ruby necklace for Jackie.

  Jack and Jackie stayed in touch by telephone, including one call from the sisters to report that the Christina had been overtaken by pirates, a jejune but ultimately harmless prank. Another time Kennedy mistakenly reached the wife of Moorhead Kennedy, an American consular officer, instead of Jackie.

  Several years later, when William Manchester interviewed Jackie for his landmark book The Death of a President, she gave him a ten-page letter she had written to Kennedy. Manchester drew from the letter to emphasize “her sorrow” that she couldn’t share with her husband the “tension-free atmosphere” of the Aegean cruise. But the letter was actually written by Jackie from Italy more than a year earlier; it contains references to the faulty telephone service in Ravello, to Caroline’s easy adjustment, and to a future weekend in Newport with David and Sissie Gore. Manchester’s mistake was amplified by other writers over the years as evidence of Jackie’s “complexity” and the “authentic love” rekindled after Patrick’s death.