Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Patricia Lawford “was in a bad way before the tragedy,” Jackie said six months after the assassination. “She has been worse since.” Pat and Peter were divorced in 1966, and she battled drinking problems for many years. She moved to New York City to live a quieter life than her ex-husband, who stayed in California. His acting career stalled out, and he succumbed to drug and alcohol abuse. He died of liver and kidney failure in 1984 at age sixty-one.

  Eunice Shriver expanded her work with the mentally and physically handicapped into the Special Olympics, a worldwide organization. Sarge worked for Lyndon Johnson first as the head of the War on Poverty and later as ambassador to France. In 1972, George McGovern chose Sargent Shriver as his running mate, and their ticket suffered a crushing defeat by Jack Kennedy’s old nemesis, Richard Nixon.

  Jean and Stephen Smith continued to live in New York, where he managed the Kennedy family’s business enterprises. His womanizing strained their marriage, but they remained together. In 1974, Jean founded Very Special Arts to provide arts education and programs for people with disabilities. Steve died of cancer in 1990 at age sixty-two. Three years later President Bill Clinton named Jean ambassador to Ireland, where she served for five years.

  Joseph Alsop spent considerable time consoling Jackie. When she moved into her Georgetown home he gave her a Japanese lacquered box in black and gold, “the colors of love and death,” she noted. “People always say time makes everything better,” Jackie wrote Alsop nine months after the assassination. It wasn’t true about Jack, she said—“just the reverse for me—and the same for you . . . How awful when the best in you is not called upon anymore.”

  Alsop saw his influence as a columnist wane after Jack’s death, and he directed his energy to writing books about art and antiquities that were praised for their erudition. After a three-year battle with cancer, Joe’s brother Stewart died in 1974 at age sixty. A year later Joe and Susan Mary were divorced. To finance his retirement, Alsop sold the Dumbarton Avenue house and rented a friend’s home nearby, where he kept his position as the über-host of Georgetown until he died of lung cancer at seventy-eight in 1989.

  Janet Auchincloss had the presence of mind on the weekend after the funeral to tell Jackie’s maid, Provie, not to clean the pink Chanel suit Jackie had worn the day Jack was shot. “I had a feeling that this was the last link. I felt this precious blood not wash out,” she said. She placed the suit in a box marked “worn by Jackie 11-22-63” in the attic of her Georgetown home alongside the box containing Jackie’s wedding dress. (The pink suit eventually went to the National Archives to be kept in storage for one hundred years.) Jackie and her children continued to spend holidays at Hammersmith Farm. As Janet and Hughdie’s fortunes shrank, Jackie gave them financial support. A decade after Hughdie’s death in 1976, Janet was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Jackie set up a $1 million trust fund for nursing care and traveled frequently to Newport in the last four years of her mother’s life. When Janet died in 1989 at age eighty-one, Jackie was at her bedside at Hammersmith Farm.

  Letitia Baldrige worked for six years at the Kennedy family’s Merchandise Mart in Chicago and wrote a best-selling memoir. She married at age thirty-eight, had two children, and moved to New York City, where she built a thriving public relations business. Baldrige made a name for herself as a lecturer and writer on etiquette, teaching comportment to bank tellers as well as business executives. She returned to Washington with her husband in 1988.

  Charles and Martha Bartlett continued to see Jackie intermittently and kept up with John, who was Martha’s godson. In 1967 the Bartletts traveled to Cambodia with Jackie, but their times together were never the same: they seemed to remind Jackie of a past she didn’t wish to think about. Charley moved his column to the Washington Star, and for a time teamed with Cord Meyer, but his audience dwindled. Eventually Bartlett shifted to writing a weekly political newsletter that had a respectable circulation among opinion makers.

  Lem Billings was probably the saddest of the Kennedy “widows.” “In many ways Lem thought of his life being over after Jack died,” said Bobby Kennedy Jr. Billings occupied himself at first raising money for Washington’s Cultural Center, which was renamed the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Jackie kept aloof from Billings, however. Through the next generation of Kennedys he tried to keep the family spirit alive as a one-man oral history—“a link to our dead fathers,” said Bobby Kennedy Jr. Kennedy youngsters flocked to Billings’s art- and antique-filled townhouse in New York. While spinning tales for them, Billings also shared their indulgence in alcohol and illicit drugs. On May 28, 1981—the day before JFK’s sixty-fourth birthday—he died of a heart attack at age sixty-five.

  Ben and Tony Bradlee saw Jackie a few times after Jack’s death, but they quickly lost touch. “The relationship of four was not going to work as a relationship of three,” Ben concluded. Tony felt that she and Ben “brought back sad memories.” Ben and Tony split in 1973, and five years later he married writer Sally Quinn. In 1975, Ben published Conversations with Kennedy based on his journals. Jackie considered the book a violation of her privacy and disliked the inclusion of Jack’s profanity. She never spoke to Ben again. Bradlee achieved fame as editor of the Washington Post, overseeing the newspaper’s Watergate investigations that eventually toppled Richard Nixon from power.

  McGeorge Bundy stayed on as Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser for more than two years. Along with Robert McNamara, Bundy presided over the escalation of the American involvement in Vietnam. Bundy left Washington in March 1966 to head the Ford Foundation. After his retirement in 1979, he taught history at New York University and authored Danger and Survival, an analysis of American nuclear policy in the Cold War. He died of a heart attack in 1996 at age seventy-seven.

  Oleg Cassini prospered as a dress designer on the strength of his Kennedy association, making mass-produced clothing. He worked out of an elegant Manhattan townhouse and spent weekends on a fifty-acre estate on Long Island.

  Vivian Crespi remained close to Jackie, sharing her New York life and coincidentally living in the building where Jack Bouvier had spent his later years. For more than a decade Crespi had a romance with Italian writer Luigi Barzini, and they spent time with Jackie and Tempelsman, who brought Jackie “peace of mind” in Crespi’s view.

  Douglas Dillon was Johnson’s Treasury secretary until 1965. He returned to Wall Street and served as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1970 to 1978 and chairman for five more years. Shuttling among his homes in Manhattan; Hobe Sound, Florida; and Isleboro, Maine, he lived as a consummate gentleman. He remained active into his nineties; only weeks before his death in 2003 at ninety-three he was making decisions on acquisitions for the Met from his hospital bed.

  Paul Fay returned to California and rejoined the family business. In 1966, Fay wrote The Pleasure of His Company, an affectionate memoir of his friendship with Jack. At Jackie’s request, Bobby Kennedy, who had been nearly as close to Fay as Jack was, reviewed the manuscript. Jackie was incensed about Fay’s “locker room humor,” and she objected that the book would “diminish” his brother. Bobby demanded that Fay cut two thirds of the book. Fay made some excisions, but kept most of the personal material that had offended the Kennedys.

  Eve and Paul Fout saw Jackie frequently when she resumed hunting in Virginia in 1984 after many years spending her weekends in the horse country of Far Hills, New Jersey. Eve had started Caroline in a pony club when she was in kindergarten, and in later years Caroline brought her own children to ride with the Fouts as well.

  John Kenneth Galbraith continued to teach economics at Harvard and write books. Jackie maintained an affectionate relationship with him and relied on him for advice. By leaving the administration when he did, Galbraith had already broken free and moved forward. As he wrote years later, the death of Roosevelt “meant a world come to an end. The loss of Kennedy was that of a well-loved friend. Life went on.”

  David Ormsby Gore became Lord
Harlech when his father died in 1964. He deeply admired Jackie’s “proud, independent spirit” and considered her personality “a sacred thing . . . not to be tampered with or displayed to all . . . No one has a right to see into the inner recesses of one’s heart.” David Gore finished his term as ambassador in 1965, and two years later Sissie was killed at age forty-five in an automobile accident. He and Jackie had a romance for several months, even traveling together to Cambodia and Thailand late in 1967. In 1985, when he was sixty-six, he too died in a car crash.

  Robert McNamara stayed on for five years as Johnson’s defense secretary, but LBJ always suspected him of leaking information to Bobby Kennedy. Johnson was intimidated by McNamara’s intellect and actively courted his approval. Yet Johnson periodically turned on his defense secretary in meetings, where he “squeezed him like an orange.” As the principal architect of the Johnson administration’s failed Vietnam policy, McNamara was haunted by that legacy. After leaving the government in 1968, he ran the World Bank for thirteen years and wrote two books, In Retrospect and Argument Without End, seeking to explain his views on Vietnam.

  Bunny Mellon grew closer to Jackie even as she herself withdrew further from the social world. After Jackie sold Wexford for $225,000 in 1964, she abandoned Virginia as a regular retreat for two decades. But she saw the Mellons in New York, on the Cape, and in Antigua. When Jackie embraced the Virginia hunt country again, she became a permanent houseguest at Oak Spring, where she stabled her horses and rode in privacy. Jackie sought Bunny’s help on a number of projects, from the final landscaping scheme for JFK’s Arlington grave to the house Jackie built on Martha’s Vineyard. Bunny also redesigned the East Garden at the White House, although Jackie declined to return for its dedication as the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden by Lady Bird Johnson in April 1965. The associations with the past were too painful, she explained to Lady Bird. “I will always think it was [JFK’s] garden because he planned it,” Jackie wrote.

  Mary Meyer “sort of picked up and went on,” said Cicely Angleton. Meyer continued to paint, working in a studio behind the Bradlees’ house in Georgetown. Her work was exhibited, and she seemed reasonably contented. Although Meyer and her friend Helen Chavchavadze stayed in touch, Meyer never shared her secret about JFK. Chavchavadze remarried in 1964 and devoted herself to writing poetry, splitting her time between Key West and Cape Cod.

  On October 12, 1964, Meyer took one of her customary walks on the towpath of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal along the Potomac River. There, in the middle of the day, she was shot twice in the head at point-blank range—a chilling repetition of her former lover’s fate—and died instantly, just two days before her forty-fourth birthday. Raymond Crump Jr., an African-American drifter, was charged with the murder. Crump gave a confused account of his behavior that day, but no murder weapon was ever found, and Crump’s lawyer raised doubts about the account of a witness who saw, from some distance, a black man standing over Meyer’s body. After deliberating eleven hours, a racially mixed jury acquitted Crump of first-degree murder. Like Kennedy’s assassination a year earlier, Meyer’s shocking death spawned its share of conspiracy theorists who speculated that she was killed because she knew too much about Kennedy.

  Lawrence O’Brien had always maintained cordiality with LBJ, which made him the most compatible New Frontiersman in the Johnson administration. “O’Brien knew he was working with the best legislative mind and operator in the modern era,” said Johnson aide Harry McPherson. “It was like a race car driver who gets to drive a Ferrari. When LBJ was vice president Larry was not authorized to use this Ferrari. Now O’Brien could really use this guy.” Johnson rewarded him by naming him to the cabinet as postmaster general, and O’Brien went on to lead the Democratic National Committee. In 1972 it was his office at the DNC in the Watergate building that Republican operatives burglarized to obtain political intelligence—the beginning of the scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation two years later. O’Brien died in 1990 at age seventy-three.

  Kenneth O’Donnell reacted to Kennedy’s death initially by seeking to comfort Jackie on many afternoons with Bobby, although he acknowledged “she probably was more consoling to us than we were helpful to her.” Kenny O’Donnell stayed in Johnson’s West Wing until Bobby Kennedy won his Senate seat. O’Donnell ran twice for governor of Massachusetts without the blessing of the Kennedys. On the campaign trail, he was an awkward candidate who had “no political presence,” said William Manchester. “He lived for Jack.”

  By then, O’Donnell had fallen into a self-destructive spiral that Manchester first glimpsed in the bar of the Mayflower Hotel in the spring of 1964: “He had eleven screwdrivers lined up and drank them all.” Even O’Donnell’s daughter Helen acknowledged the terrible toll of his alcoholism—and her mother’s as well. “They died long before their last breath,” Helen O’Donnell wrote. O’Donnell and his wife (also named Helen) got divorced and both died in 1977. He was fifty-three.

  David Powers trekked to the Harriman home each day to have lunch and play with John Jr. For months Powers endured “violent pains . . . confined to the back of his skull . . . where he had seen the last bullet strike.” The headaches subsided, and Powers remained with the Lyndon Johnson White House until early 1965. In 1970, Powers and Kenny O’Donnell published an affectionate memoir about JFK titled “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye.” Until his death at age eighty-five in 1998, Powers devoted himself to Jack Kennedy’s memory as curator of the John F. Kennedy Library, a majestic building designed by I. M. Pei with a sweeping view of the Boston harbor.

  Lee Radziwill remained with Jackie for weeks at the Harriman house, where they received regular visits by Jack’s friends and aides. In her anguish, Jackie lashed out at Lee. “She hits me across the face,” Lee told Cecil Beaton. “I’ve done nothing.” Lee’s romance with Onassis didn’t last, but in 1973 she and Stas split up, and he died of a heart attack two years later. Lee moved to New York, tried her hand at interior design and acting, suffered financial decline and drinking problems, and had highly publicized romances with photographer Peter Beard and attorney Peter Tufo. Jackie helped Lee financially, but the marriage to Onassis led to a long estrangement between the sisters. Lee gave up drinking and was reconciled with her sister during Jackie’s illness from cancer.

  James Reed attended Jackie’s first dinner party in Georgetown, along with Bobby, Red Fay, and Bob McNamara. “Red was singing and dancing,” Reed recalled. “Jackie was withdrawn, cordial, and lovely. We never talked of the President.” Reed practiced law and ran a financial consulting business for five years in New York City, and afterwards in Maine. “I never really worked for anyone, and I never retired,” he said. Still, his ex-wife Jewel recalled, “He never stopped looking at the Kennedy years as the zenith of his career.”

  Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. and his wife Suzanne were divorced in 1969, and he married three more times. In the months after JFK’s death, Roosevelt was one of Jackie’s faithful visitors in Georgetown. After leaving the Commerce Department in 1965, he served Johnson as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for its first year. FDR Jr. returned to New York and ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for governor. He spent the following years working for several organizations dedicated to the legacy of his parents and raising cattle on his farm in upstate New York. When he died at age seventy-four in 1988, Jackie told his widow, Tobie, “Oh how I loved your Franklin. He was such a gentleman.”

  Arthur Schlesinger left the White House at the end of January 1964, and he and Marian divorced the following year. “Life in the White House was a pressure cooker,” he explained. “I think the shock of Dallas suddenly made people examine their lives and decide if a marriage wasn’t working. Mine wasn’t working then.” He moved to New York and became an acclaimed writer. “I had spent forty years in Cambridge,” he said. “I decided I had other lives to live.” Noted Marian, “Arthur became a celebrity, and for a while he was even a playboy.” With A Thousand Days and a su
bsequent biography of Robert Kennedy, Schlesinger found a role far more important than what he ever did in the White House: creating an essential record of the Kennedy years, which formed the bedrock of the enduring Kennedy mythology.

  Florence Smith was suffering from leukemia through the latter part of the Kennedy administration, a fact that Earl concealed from her as well as their friends. When Flo died at age forty-five in November 1965, Jackie wrote to “Dearest Dearest Earl” of “so many memories—so much of all our happy times gone now with dearest loving Flo—Who ever thought you and I would be the ones left.” Earl moved permanently to Palm Beach, where he was elected to numerous terms as mayor. He died in 1991 at age eighty-eight.

  Theodore Sorensen never entirely recovered from the assassination of Jack Kennedy. Sorensen “lived this man’s life, thought with him and spoke the same words,” said Katie Louchheim. Afterwards, Louchheim noted, Sorensen was “not morose but stilled. He was often bitter.”

  Sorensen was the first to leave Johnson’s White House, in mid-January 1964, and he moved to New York where he joined the prestigious law firm of Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison. Sorensen’s biography of Kennedy came out in 1965 along with Schlesinger’s. Like his colleague, he presented a proudly partisan account. He became one of the Kennedy family’s closest advisers, and he wrote speeches for Bobby’s senatorial and presidential campaigns. In later years he worked for the Democratic party, lectured, and wrote opinion pieces about issues of the day. Jackie came to rely on Sorensen as a trusted counselor. The better he knew her, he said, the more he “lived in awe of Jackie.”