Of course, with Jack came not only his money but also his close-knit and ebullient family. Jackie formed an early bond with the Ambassador—in time he would become her favorite in the family other than Jack—and maintained a polite but wary relationship with Rose, but she struggled to connect with the younger Kennedy women, including Robert’s wife, Ethel, who, with her rambunctious competitiveness, struck many as being “more Kennedy than the Kennedys.” Their boisterousness was of a type Jackie had never encountered before, and it didn’t help that they poked fun at her wispy, baby-doll voice and her demure and refined manners, or that they chuckled at her bringing pâté, quiche, and wine to an afternoon sail while they took peanut butter sandwiches. They called her “the deb,” as in debutante, and mimicked her behind her back, determined to poke fun at what they saw as her superior attitude; she reciprocated by referring to them as “the rah-rah girls.” Though physically stronger and more coordinated than is often suggested, Jackie puzzled over the intense family focus on sporting events (in the huddle of a touch football game on the family lawn, she said to one of Jack’s aides, “Just tell me one thing: when I get the ball, which way do I run?”), and she gave her sister Lee a stinging account of the Kennedys’ proclivity for games in which they “fell all over each other like gorillas.”*1 Even at mealtimes, she noticed, the Kennedys seemed to be competing over who would say the most and talk the loudest. Jack, in a classic understatement, said his girlfriend was “sensitive by contrast to my sisters who are direct and energetic.”13
During the cacophonous family dinners, Jackie usually kept quiet. “A penny for your thoughts,” Jack once asked her, and the room fell silent with anticipation. “If I told them to you, they wouldn’t be mine, would they, Jack?”14
“Jackie was certainly very bored by politics and very bored by the very aggressive camaraderie of the Kennedy family, [which was] absolutely foreign to her nature,” said Alastair Forbes later. “Fortunately, I think, she also spotted that it was really foreign to Jack’s nature. He was loyal to his family…but he was of them and not of them.” He was more sensitive than they were, Jackie determined, and less extroverted.15
Mutual acquaintances spotted another thing they had in common: they were competitive, including with each other. Early in the relationship, they often played Monopoly or Chinese checkers or word games such as Categories, at which Jack often excelled. It burned him and intrigued him when she held her own and sometimes bested him in these contests. (In Scrabble, she proved almost unbeatable.) “From the beginning there was a playful element between them,” Lem Billings recalled. “Jackie gave him a good match: that’s one of the things Jack liked. But there was a serious element too. Who was going to win?”16
“He saw her as a kindred spirit,” Billings went on. “I think he understood that the two of them were alike. They had both taken circumstances that weren’t the best in the world when they were younger and learned how to make themselves up as they went along.”17 Their pasts, that is to say, affected them in complex ways. Jackie didn’t have Jack’s health problems growing up, but she and her younger sister, Lee, endured a trying childhood in a dysfunctional family environment. Their parents, John Vernou Bouvier III, a flamboyant New York Stock Exchange member who claimed to trace his lineage to French soldiers who fought in the American Revolutionary War, and Janet Bouvier (née Lee), the daughter of a self-made millionaire, engaged in frequent alcohol-fueled fights over his serial womanizing and chronic financial failings. Then each would badmouth the other in front of the girls. We can only speculate about the effect of this behavior on the daughters; to a degree, at least, Jackie seems to have responded by retreating from the world and from other people. She found escape and refuge in books and horses, competing from an early age in equestrian competitions and even winning two events in the junior ranks at the equestrian national championships at Madison Square Garden.
Jack Bouvier, whose French immigrant ancestors in Philadelphia had experienced anti-Catholic prejudice not unlike that endured by County Wexford’s Patrick Kennedy, was as charismatic as he was erratic. With the dark good looks and pencil-style mustache of Clark Gable, he was vain and self-absorbed. He exercised in the gym regularly and used a sunlamp to stay tan, and didn’t mind at all when he acquired nicknames that bespoke his playboy ways—the Black Orchid, the Black Sheik, and, most commonly, Black Jack. By all accounts he was terrific company, a raconteur and bon vivant whose lecherous ways had compensating qualities, at least in the eyes of some women. “Bouvier was unusual among the philanderers of his day,” one of his paramours said. “Women were not just collectibles for him. He actually liked their company, liked the feminine perspective and the social quality of women’s lives.” Both of his daughters felt closer to him than to their mother, even after Jack and Janet divorced and she married Hugh D. “Hughdie” Auchincloss, a kindly, serene Episcopalian and Standard Oil heir from Virginia. Janet, a social striver of the first order, had a fierce temper; she often took out her frustrations on her daughters, in particular Jackie, faulting her looks and clothing choices. Even Jackie’s studiousness and love of books came in for rebuke—like many women of her class and period, Janet lived by the philosophy that men frowned on women who had their own intellectual interests and professional goals; accordingly, her daughters should cultivate the skills required to make men feel comfortable and important, and direct their own ambitions toward being effective homemakers.18
“All the fighting had an impact on both girls, of course,” said Truman Capote, who got to know both Bouvier sisters and became especially close with Lee. “It made them both terribly cautious, a little afraid of people and relationships in general….Even at that age, I think [Jackie] could appreciate that her mother was this sort of hideous control freak, a cold fish with social ambitions, and her father was a naughty, naughty boy who kept getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Of course, both girls loved him more. Who wouldn’t, given the choice?”19
Young Jacqueline with her parents at the Southampton Riding and Hunt Club’s sixth annual Horse Show, August 1934.
According to biographer Barbara Leaming, Jackie internalized many of her mother’s harshest judgments about her—she was too tall, at five foot seven, too dark, too flat-chested, too boyish in figure. “In view of what Janet insisted was her utter lack of physical allure, she cultivated seductive mannerisms such as a whispery, baby voice….She trained herself to behave in an extremely flirtatious manner and presented herself as a fragile airhead, the antithesis of the strong, clever, curious young woman she really was.”20
At fifteen, Jackie was enrolled at Miss Porter’s School, in Farmington, Connecticut, one of the most respected finishing schools in New England, which still operated by its founding philosophy of a century before, that the core purpose of a young woman’s education was to make her a more pleasing companion to her husband. Jackie chafed against this culture—in the school’s yearbook she listed her ambition in life as “Not to be a housewife”—but only to a degree: she did not appear to question, either then or in the years that followed, the notion that it should be a chief goal in life to “marry well,” or the corollary idea that a woman should live life through her man and make his successes her own.21 A strong student, Jackie maintained an A-minus average and also involved herself in the drama and riding clubs and helped edit the school newspaper. But she also treasured solitude: when the other girls socialized after evening study hall, her roommate remembered, “Jackie seldom joined in, happily staying in her room, reading, writing poetry or drawing…by nature she was a loner.”22
From Miss Porter’s she moved on to Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, but not before being presented to society in Newport, Rhode Island, where the Auchinclosses maintained an estate. (“Queen Deb of the Year,” wrote one New York society columnist, “is Jacqueline Bouvier, a regal brunette who has classic features and the daintiness of a Dresden porcelain.
She has poise, is soft-spoken and intelligent, everything the leading debutante should be.”)23 At Vassar, Jackie, part of an entering class of approximately two hundred women, took courses in literature and history and joined the college newspaper staff, the drama group (as a costume designer), and the art club. Well liked by the other students, she could also be secretive, projecting a sense of apartness, even aloofness. “You never knew what she was thinking or what she was really feeling,” one classmate said.24
The sense of mystery may have added to her allure among college men, who came calling with regularity. “Young men were constantly trying every kind of trick to make her go out with them,” said Letitia Baldrige, who had been a year ahead of Jackie at Miss Porter’s and would continue to know her in the decades to come (including as White House social secretary). “Her classic good looks were complemented by her sense of style, which had been apparent from her early teens.” She would put on a simple skirt and shirt, add just the right belt, and, with her perfect posture and bearing, come off exquisite, Baldrige marveled. “Nothing ever looked wrong on her.” But though Jackie accepted a number of dates—she went to football games and dances at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard, among other places—she avoided committing herself. When returning from a date with a young man in a taxi, she would tell the driver, “Hold your meter.” Crestfallen escorts realized they would not get beyond the front door.25
Jackie didn’t take to Vassar—she thought it hidebound and provincial—but she loved her junior year in France, in 1949–50, most of which she spent in Paris, studying French history and art history at the Sorbonne. All the instruction was in French. It thrilled her, she reflected afterwards, that here she didn’t have to cloak her smarts or the fact that she had genuine intellectual interests, but she also led a full social life, venturing out on an almost nightly basis from her rented room on avenue Mozart, in the fashionable if slightly stuffy sixteenth arrondissement, sipping coffee or wine at the Ritz Bar or Café de Flore or La Coupole and hitting the nightspots on both banks of the Seine until all hours. She frequented the museums and galleries, the opera and the ballet. Her French, middling at the outset, became fluent. She also went on dates, seeing a French diplomat’s son as well as an aspiring young writer named Ormonde de Kay and, some accounts say, losing her virginity in an elevator to a dashing young American writer, John P. Marquand Jr., son of the novelist. (The elevator to his apartment supposedly “stalled” between floors, a trick Marquand had used with women before her.)26
Jackie did not return to Vassar for senior year. She sought a more urban environment and transferred to George Washington University, from which she graduated in 1951 with a degree in French literature. She then explored, intriguingly, a job with the CIA, but either she did not pursue it or she was not granted an interview. Instead, she entered and won Vogue magazine’s Prix de Paris contest for excellence in design and editorial ability, besting twelve hundred other entrants for the grand prize and the chance to live and work for the magazine in Paris.*2, 27 She turned down the award—her mother and stepfather felt she had already spent too much time abroad, and she herself worried that if she went she might never come back—and instead took a position with the Washington Times-Herald (where Inga Arvad had also worked) as the “Inquiring Camera Girl” who asked people lighthearted questions and took their photograph. (“Winston Churchill once observed that marriages have a better chance of survival when the spouses don’t breakfast together. Do you agree?” “Should men wear wedding rings?” “If you had a date with Marilyn Monroe, what would you talk about?” “Would you like your son to grow up to be president?”) Her weekly starting salary was $42.50; within a few months the figure rose to $56.75. On one occasion, she made the newly elected senator from Massachusetts her subject, snapping his photo and posting his answer to a question concerning the role of pages (assistants) in the work of the Senate.28
III
And so it was that John F. Kennedy appeared at Dwight Eisenhower’s inaugural ball, on January 20, 1953, with Jacqueline Bouvier on his arm. It was a heady time to be in the nation’s capital, and the new senator relished every minute. From the start, he found the clubby, collegial atmosphere of the Senate preferable to the rowdier, more plebeian spirit of the House of Representatives. The emphasis in the upper chamber on decorum, on tradition, on gentility appealed to his temperament and his historical sensibility. Here had walked the legislative giants he’d read about since boyhood—Clay, Webster, La Follette, and all the rest. Here had been hammered out many of the key policy decisions in the nation’s history, especially during the long era when Congress held greater sway over policy than did the executive branch. That era of congressional supremacy had long since waned, yet even now Kennedy could expect to have much more visibility as a senator than he ever could have hoped to achieve in the House, especially in the realm of foreign affairs.29 If sporadically in the past he had been able to rub elbows with the highest-placed people in government, in the judiciary, and in the press, now he would be doing so on a regular basis, no longer as the Ambassador’s son who had used his family’s riches to acquire a House seat but as his own man—the intrepid wonder candidate who had stood against the Republican wave of 1952 and taken down the mighty Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.
His star, to be sure, had dimmed somewhat in the weeks since his monster win. He was still seen as a standout in an otherwise lackluster roster of new Democrats on the Hill, but the contemporaneous record shows few predictions of greatness either from within the party establishment or from the national press. Observers of an intellectual stripe questioned Kennedy’s liberal credentials and his silence on McCarthyism, while others wondered about his Catholicism and how much it could shackle his ambitions. Skeptics in the mainstream press asked about the extent of his father’s influence, mused about the role that his family wealth had played in his victory, and wondered what it said about him that he seemingly relied so heavily on female voters drawn by his youthful look and radiant smile.30
On his first day in the Senate, as he took his seat in the last row of the Democratic phalanx, Kennedy could see to his right the articulate and fiery Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, now starting his fifth year in office, and, directly in front, the widely respected liberal Paul H. Douglas of Illinois, also beginning his fifth year. Not far away was yet another member of that class of 1948, the hulking and fleshy-faced new minority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, and two courtly southerners, Richard Russell of Georgia, first elected in 1932, and J. William Fulbright, from the class of 1944. And in the distance, over the heads of the Democratic caucus, Jack could spot the dark jowls of his fellow House freshman from 1947, Richard M. Nixon, who, as the new vice president, served in the role of president of the Senate. As he gazed around the room, Jack knew he was a peon next to these men, a minnow among whales. He knew that the Senate’s hierarchical structure, based on seniority and committee chairmanships and reputation, sharply limited his capacity for influence in the early going and perhaps beyond. But no matter: he was here, in the chamber, with a seat of his own.31
Some Kennedy associates who hoped to move up with him were disappointed. They learned what others before them had come to know: that with the Kennedys, loyalty went only so far. Tony Galluccio, a friend from Harvard days who had trekked all over Massachusetts for a year and a half on Jack’s behalf, doing yeoman’s work to help set up the statewide campaign apparatus and enduring endless bus rides and lousy restaurant meals in the process, expected now to have the chance to serve in the Washington office; it seemed a just reward for all he had done in the campaign. Weeks went by with no word. Finally Jack called him, but not with the hoped-for news. “I’ve got no money,” the senator told him.32
Kennedy’s secretary, Mary Davis, who’d been with him since he arrived in Congress six years before and regularly worked seven days a week, including from home on Sundays, found him unexpectedly resistant when she asked for a pay increase comm
ensurate with a shift to a larger office in which she would have increased responsibilities. Currently, she reminded him, she was being paid $4,000 a year, and a freshman congressman from New York was offering her $6,000; would he match it? No, Kennedy replied, he would only go to $4,800. Nor would he agree to pay the new team of junior secretaries Davis had recruited to assist her in the office more than $60 a week.
She couldn’t believe her ears. “Sixty dollars a week! You’ve got to be joking. Nobody I’ve lined up would be willing to accept a job at that salary. I have to have competent, capable staff who can back me up. If I don’t, I won’t have a life to call my own.”
“Mary, you can get candy dippers in Charlestown for fifty dollars a week.”
“Yes, and you’d have candy dippers on your senatorial staff who wouldn’t know beans. If that’s what you want, I’m not taking charge of it.”
Back and forth they went, neither willing to budge. Davis thought it only right that she and the rest of the staff be paid the going rate for Senate office employees; Kennedy, having been urged by his father to keep a tight lid on office expenditures, disagreed. For him, as for the Ambassador, staffers were ultimately employees who could be replaced. Those who pressed to be compensated according to market rates were insufficiently loyal and should go. Mary Davis went.33
One of the hopefuls for a position in the office that January was a twenty-four-year-old attorney from Nebraska named Theodore Sorensen. Tall and intense, with a square face and horn-rimmed glasses, Sorensen hailed from a progressive, politically active family in Lincoln—his Danish American father, a close ally of U.S. Senator George Norris, had served two terms as a crusading state attorney general and made an unsuccessful bid for governor; his mother, a descendant of Russian Jews, was a suffragist deeply involved with progressive causes and the League of Women Voters. Young Ted, who was named for Theodore Roosevelt and shared a birthday with Harry Truman, starred on his high school debate team, made Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Nebraska, and then graduated first in his class from the university’s law school, where he also edited the law review. Having come, as a friend commented, “campaigning from the womb,” he worked in local Democratic campaigns and was active in the civil rights movement, even helping to found a chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Nebraska. He also got married, to a woman named Camilla Palmer, who in short order bore him the first of three sons. But America’s political mecca beckoned, and Sorensen soon relocated his young family to Washington and set about making his mark. Initially a lawyer with the Federal Security Agency, he gravitated to Capitol Hill and took a job as counsel to a minor congressional committee. From there he followed the 1952 election with rapt attention. The Democrats’ poor showing dismayed him, but he was intrigued and impressed by the young victor in Massachusetts, and as the year turned he made his approach.
JFK Page 67