JFK

by Fredrik Logevall

  Spalding remembered of that evening:

  Jack was enjoying himself, and yet I had the strange feeling that Jack was watching everything with an extra eye, as if the eye was outside of himself, in a corner of the room, surveying the scene with a kind of detachment. It was a very eerie thing to see this, and feel it, but there it was. I remember I cut myself and Jack was immediately at my side, looking at the cut, suggesting I should go to the hospital. It was one of his qualities that bound people to him. Concerned. Sensitive. But the point is, he could be part of what was going on, and yet that extra eye saw me. I know it sounds strange. But I felt he always had an extra eye.73

  The wedding day dawned clear and breezy. Like her mother, Jackie had wanted a different kind of wedding, smaller and more cozy, with attendees who knew the bridal couple and cared about them. What she got was something else: many hundreds of guests, most of whom she had never laid eyes on before, as well as hordes of reporters and photographers recording her every move. When she arrived at the church for the eleven o’clock ceremony, a crowd of three thousand onlookers broke through police lines and for a moment seemed set on smothering her. She kept her composure, smiling bashfully in her cream taffeta gown, with tight-fitting bodice and bouffant skirt. Then more disappointment: her father was too hungover from drinking by himself the night before to give her away. (Janet Bouvier Auchincloss had forbidden him from attending the pre-wedding dinner.) Her stepfather did the honors instead, while Black Jack slipped into the chapel at the last minute and sat inconspicuously near the back. When Jack and Bobby walked down the aisle and took their places near the altar, they looked, one observer said, “too tanned and handsome to be believed.”74 Archbishop Richard Cushing, a close friend of the Kennedys, performed the ceremony, celebrating the nuptial Mass and reading a special blessing from Pope Pius XII. To the accompaniment of “Panis Angelicus” and “Ave Maria,” the couple knelt at the flower-bedecked altar and recited their vows.

  As Senator and Mrs. Kennedy stepped out of the church, the crowd surged forward again, the groom, according to The New York Times, smiling broadly “and the bride appearing a little startled.”75 Cars backed up for more than half a mile for the reception at Hammersmith Farm, and the couple spent more than two hours in the receiving line shaking hands. A buffet was served in the house and on the lawns outside overlooking Narragansett Bay, and the bride and groom distributed slices of the wedding cake as white-jacketed waiters fanned out with trays of champagne and an orchestra played. Among the guests were film star Marion Davies, singer Morton Downey, several U.S. senators and congressmen and state legislators (including Jack’s successor from the Eleventh District, Tip O’Neill), and a phalanx of industrialists and business-tycoon acquaintances of Joe Kennedy’s. Hughdie and Janet’s friends were fewer in number and more Waspy—more Republican—and they kept mostly to themselves during the reception, speculating sotto voce about what tragic fate might have befallen Jack Bouvier to keep him from giving his daughter away. Throughout the exhausting affair, bride and groom posed gamely for the photographers, Jackie balking only once, when she was asked to stand with her husband clinking champagne glasses. “Too corny,” she declared.76

  Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy with members of their wedding party. To the left of the groom are, from left, George Smathers, Lem Billings, Torby Macdonald, and Chuck Spalding. In front of Macdonald is Jackie’s sister Lee, and in the very front is Ethel Kennedy. On the top right is Red Fay.

  When evening came and the last of the guests departed, Joe Kennedy had every reason to be pleased: this was indeed a spectacular social celebration, certain to get attention from coast to coast in the coming days, with photos of the couple in newspapers large and small. Even the normally staid New York Times got carried away, gushing in a front-page story that the event “far surpassed the Astor-French wedding of 1934 in public interest.”77

  The newlyweds, for their part, were happy to be on their way, first to New York for a night at the Waldorf Astoria, then on to Acapulco and a pink stucco villa above the Pacific that Jackie had found enchanting on a previous visit with her mother and Hughdie.78 One of her first acts there was to pen an affectionate letter of forgiveness to her father, while Jack, for his part, wired his parents: “At last I know the true meaning of rapture. Jackie is enshrined forever in my heart. Thanks Mom and Dad for making me worthy of her.”79 After a few days the couple flew to California, where they spent time at San Ysidro Ranch near Santa Barbara before continuing north to the Monterey Peninsula and then to San Francisco and the home of Red Fay and his wife, Anita. (“God, she’s a fantastic-looking woman,” Red had told Jack upon meeting the soft-spoken Jackie at Hammersmith Farm before the wedding, “but if you ever get a little hard of hearing you’re going to have a little trouble picking up all the transmissions.”) On the final day in California, Jack joined Red for a 49ers football game and left Jackie behind with Anita, who showed her some of the Bay Area sights. “I’m sure this didn’t seem a particularly unusual arrangement to Jack,” Red wrote, acknowledging Jackie’s resentment. “The pressures of public life—not to mention those of an old shipmate and his wife—too often intruded on the kind of honeymoon any young bride anticipates.”80

  The couple share a moment at the wedding reception with Bobby, Pat, Eunice, Teddy, and Jean.

  The pressures did not end with their return to the East Coast. Having not lived together before the wedding, they were unprepared for the intricacies of married life. Each emotionally reticent, each self-centered, they struggled to open themselves up to each other. Then there was Jack’s busy work schedule, which left Jackie alone a great deal of the time, including on weekends. Even when he was around, she subsequently said, her husband seemed so preoccupied she “might as well be in Alaska.” Jack, looking to his parents’ example, didn’t fully realize how these absences—literal and figurative—harmed the relationship. It didn’t help that they resided initially not in their own home—a small, narrow rented nineteenth-century house at 3321 Dent Place, in Georgetown, that was not ready for occupancy—but in Hyannis Port, where Jackie put up with the compulsive athleticism of the Kennedys and chafed at the strict rules about punctuality at mealtimes, but where she also found a measure of calmness on the windswept Cape Cod seashore. She painted watercolors, several of which Joe Kennedy insisted on hanging on the walls of the house—one showed a crowd of young Kennedys on the beach, along with the caption “You can’t take it with you. Dad’s got it all.”81 She and her father-in-law found themselves kindred spirits, and spent hours talking. She liked him, trusted him; he felt the same about her.

  She also penned a poem—an ode to her husband in the manner of Benét’s “John Brown’s Body”—the last part of which reads:

  But now he was there with the wind and the sea

  And all the things he was going to be.

  He would build empires

  And he would have sons

  Others would fall

  Where the current runs

  He would find love

  He would never find peace

  For he must go seeking

  The Golden Fleece

  All of the things he was going to be

  All of the things in the wind and the sea.82

  Jack was so thrilled with the poem that he wanted to have it published, but Jackie refused. It was as private as a love letter, she told him, and must not be made public. He agreed, though not fully—he couldn’t resist sharing it with family members and one or two friends. He also read her Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” which she later recited with pleasure, including Jack’s favorite lines:

  It may be he shall take my hand

  And lead me into his dark land

  And close my eyes and quench my breath…

  But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

 
At midnight in some flaming town,

  When Spring trips north again this year,

  And I to my pledged word am true,

  I shall not fail that rendezvous.

  That first fall, Jackie also wrote and illustrated a book for her eight-year-old half sister. A Book for Janet: In Case You Are Ever Thinking of Getting Married This Is a Story to Tell You What It’s Like. It began with a drawing depicting Jackie seeing her husband off to work, and went on to describe their life together. One drawing showed the dome of the Capitol at night, wholly dark except for one single lit window. “If he isn’t home and that single light is on,” the caption read, at least “you know the country is safe.” The elder Janet Auchincloss, so often stingy with her praise where Jackie was concerned, called A Book for Janet “deeply touching in a beautiful way.”83

  Though at Miss Porter’s School Jackie’s ambition had been “not to be a housewife,” in essence that’s now what she became. “I brought a certain amount of order to his life,” she later said about the first months of marriage. “We had good food in our house—not merely the bare staples that he used to have. He no longer went out in the morning with one brown shoe and one black shoe on. His clothes got pressed and he got to the airport without a mad rush because I packed for him.”84 She signed up for cooking classes, joined a bridge club, even tried to learn to play golf in order to get to spend more time with her husband. (After one interminable afternoon together on the links, he gently suggested she stick to horseback riding.)

  Jackie got a sure sense of her role when the young couple was featured on Person to Person, Edward Murrow’s popular half-hour TV program on CBS, in October. While the chain-smoking host introduced the senator as one who, at age thirty-six, had already accomplished everything most American boys dreamed of doing, Jackie sat demurely by Jack’s side on the couch in his former “bachelor establishment” on Bowdoin Street in Boston, her elegant print dress harmonizing with his conservative business suit. The few questions Murrow directed her way she answered softly and quickly, highlighting her pride at what her husband had accomplished. Jack, prompted by Murrow, rose and displayed for the camera his wartime mementos—a model of PT 109, the famous coconut on which he had carved his rescue plea, and a photo of the destroyer named for Joe Junior. He then described the circumstances of his brother’s heroic death, whereupon Murrow tossed him softball questions on public policy and on his recommendations for “inspirational reading.” (Jack, clearly primed, reached for a nearby book and read to the camera an excerpt from a moving letter the poet Alan Seeger had written to his mother shortly before his death in World War I.)85

  “The main thing for me was to do whatever my husband wanted,” Jackie later said. “He couldn’t—and wouldn’t—be married to a woman who tried to share the spotlight with him. I thought the best thing I could do was be a distraction. Jack lived and breathed politics all day long. If he came home to more table thumping, how could he ever relax?” To a reporter she insisted, with just a little too much emphasis—and no mention of the fact that she had household help from the start—that “housekeeping is a joy to me. When it all runs smoothly, when the food is good and the flowers look fresh, I have much satisfaction. I like cooking, but I’m not very good at it. I care terribly about food, but I’m not much of a cook.”86

  As for Jack, the difference between a chic home and an unstylish one was mostly lost on him, as was the contrast between a bespoke suit and an off-the-rack model. He had little appreciation of good food or good wine, being perfectly content with a steak or a cheeseburger and some ice cream. Until, that is, his wife entered the picture. “She wouldn’t go along with the Kennedy atmosphere,” recalled Jack’s British friend David Ormsby-Gore, who also became close to Jackie. “She had certain standards of her own which she insisted on in her house. They were standards about the manners [of] children, about having good food, about having beautiful furniture, the house well done up.” Jack, impatient at first, adjusted, even came to share her sensibility, at least to a degree. Ormsby-Gore again: “I remember him saying when Jackie had gone off and bought some French eighteenth-century chairs or something, ‘I don’t know why, what’s the point of spending all this money—I mean, a chair is a chair and it’s a perfectly good chair I’m sitting in—what’s the point of all this fancy stuff.’ Well that was his first reaction but gradually he came to appreciate good taste in these other matters and really cared about it by the end.”87 Jackie broadened his taste in art and improved his manners. With her gentle guidance, Jack even turned himself into a minor fashion plate, with a preference for the single-breasted, two-button suit, often pinstriped and always perfectly pressed. For the first time, he learned which tie should go with which shirt and how the wrong shoes could kill a stylish ensemble.

  He became so clothes conscious that he once told Chuck Spalding, “Your suit doesn’t make a statement.” When he realized what he’d said, they both broke out in laughter.88

  In more substantive ways, too, Jackie soon proved her importance, even as she wondered if she’d ever be able to keep up with her husband intellectually. (“He has this curious, inquiring mind that is always at work; if I were drawing him, I would draw a tiny body and an enormous head.”89) She continued to translate for him from the French, including reports on the Indochina War and the writings of Talleyrand, Voltaire, and de Gaulle, bon mots from which Jack would then sprinkle into his speeches. And she helped transform him into a better public speaker, coaxing him to abandon his high, nasal twang in favor of deeper, more sonorous tones. (A vocal coach had given Jack the same advice, and for a time he spent some minutes each morning barking like a dog to deepen his voice.) With Ted Sorensen’s help, Jackie also got him to slow his delivery—his colleagues sometimes found his rapid-fire utterances hard to follow—and to modulate his pitch and use his hands to punctuate key points, to be less fidgety onstage. The changes were not evident overnight, but gradually, as Kennedy worked on his technique and as he and Sorensen fine-tuned their collaborative speechwriting efforts, he became notably more effective at the lectern—a self-composed, authentic communicator who employed the rhythms and language of powerful rhetoric.90

  In January 1954, as he and his young wife settled into their Georgetown home, John F. Kennedy had reason to feel good about things. He had found his footing in the Senate, earning the respect of more senior colleagues, who appreciated his quiet manner, his studiousness, and his composed, good-humored, reasoned approach to policy issues. He had happened upon a once-in-a-generation political aide in Ted Sorensen, and enjoyed broad support in his home state. He had landed a bride in the beautiful, witty, sophisticated Jacqueline Bouvier, whose European sensibility he admired and shared. Their wedding had won wide coverage from coast to coast. If the patterns and demands of married life were proving a challenge in these early months, for him and for her, he felt lucky to have her, felt certain that she represented for him a political asset. Yet, as the year turned, all was not well. Jack Kennedy didn’t know it, but his annus mirabilis of 1953 would be succeeded by something very different.

  *1 A visitor to Hyannis Port spoke of participating in fourteen athletic events in one day, including sailing, waterskiing (twice), touch football (twice), tennis (twice), trampoline jumping, swimming, jogging on the beach, and baseball. He also mentioned eating a sandwich with sand in it. His efforts, he added, put him “something like only three events behind Ethel.” (Martin, Hero for Our Time, 76.)

  *2 Her application essay showed her talent for writing and her self-deprecating sense of humor—and her mother’s stifling influence: “I am tall, 5’ 7” with brown hair, a square face, and eyes so unfortunately far apart that it takes three weeks to have a pair of glasses made with a bridge wide enough to fit over my nose. I do not have a sensational figure but can look slim if I pick the right clothes. I flatter myself on being able at times to walk out of the house looking like the poor man’s Paris c
opy, but often my mother will run up and inform me that my left stocking seam is crooked or the right-hand top coat button is about to fall off. This, I realize, is the Unforgivable Sin.” In a supplemental essay discussing three people she wished she had known, she chose Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Ballets Russes founder Serge Diaghilev. (Prix de Paris application materials, box 1, JKO personal papers.)

  *3 The Hyannis Port party was the more rambunctious of the two. Among the activities was a scavenger hunt in which first prize went to whoever brought back the largest object. Patricia Kennedy went into Hyannis, hot-wired a bus, and drove it home. (Perret, Jack, 192.)

  TWENTY

  DARK DAYS

  It should have come as no real surprise that 1954 would turn into John F. Kennedy’s nightmare year. After all, neither of the two problems that erupted in full force that year was new to him. The first, indeed, had been with him since birth, in the form of a congenital spinal problem possibly made worse by injuries suffered in the South Pacific during the war. He had been in acute pain at various times during 1953, even entering George Washington University Hospital for a few days in mid-July for what were officially deemed “malaria” complications. At his wedding, in September, friends worried that he might not be able to kneel at the altar—or get back up if he did. But he pulled it off with aplomb, and managed during the subsequent honeymoon to hobble along next to his bride reasonably well. (His ailment did not stop him from taking part, on the eve of the wedding, in a touch football game in Newport that left him with scratches on his face, the result of a tumble into a briar patch after a pass play.) Though his bouts with pain were becoming more frequent, it seemed reasonable to expect that he would go on as before, relying on crutches when it got bad and making do the rest of the time.