* Sorensen’s wife was scheduled to give birth in the second week of March, but he told Kennedy he would gamble for the sake of the book. “My wife’s intuition now tells her that this baby will not come early, and therefore if you desired my [presence in Palm Beach] during the first week in March, this would be no handicap.” (Ted Sorensen to JFK, February 8, 1955, box 7, Ted Sorensen Papers.) Kennedy felt the matter was not urgent; Sorensen came later in the month, following the birth.
TWENTY-ONE
RISING STAR
On the evening of September 23, 1955, Dwight D. Eisenhower, vacationing in Colorado, retired to bed early, as was his custom. He had played twenty-seven holes of golf that day, and upon leaving the course had complained of indigestion and heartburn. The discomfort subsided, but he ate sparingly at dinner and then turned in. At 1:30 A.M. he awoke with acute pain in his chest. Mamie Eisenhower took one look at her husband and determined it was serious. Physicians were summoned, and by the following afternoon the diagnosis was confirmed: the sixty-four-year-old president had suffered a heart attack.1
Frenzied speculation followed in every corner of the land. Would he live? Even if he did, would he be too weakened to remain in office, or at least to put up with the rigors of a reelection campaign a year later? If he did not run, who would be the Republican nominee? And what would it mean for the Democratic race? As if to underscore the national anxiety, on Monday the twenty-sixth the New York Stock Exchange took its steepest plunge since the outbreak of the Depression.2 And small wonder: Eisenhower’s popularity in mid-1955 was immense—and still growing. He had steered the economy through a brief recession and had brought fiscal balance back to Washington. His expansion of social security had benefited millions. Overseas, the truce Eisenhower had secured in Korea seemed to be holding, and he had avoided new troop commitments elsewhere. A tense crisis with China over some minuscule islands off the Chinese coast—Matsu and the chain known as Quemoy—had eased, at least for the moment. Superpower relations, meanwhile, were stable, and some observers even spoke of a thawing in the Cold War as the Soviet leadership, under Nikita Khrushchev, sought a lowering of East-West tensions. In May 1955 Khrushchev ended a ten-year impasse by agreeing to pull Soviet troops out of Austria (occupied by the Allies since 1945) and to allow that nation to become independent and neutral. In July there followed a four-power summit meeting in Geneva—the first one since Potsdam, a decade before—which, though it produced nothing of substance, seemed a harbinger of a less fractious world order.
Eisenhower returned from the Swiss city to a euphoric reception, his approval rating at 79 percent. According to James Reston of The New York Times, not normally a man given to rhetorical effusiveness, “the popularity of President Eisenhower has got beyond the bounds of reasonable calculation and will have to be put down as a national phenomenon, like baseball. The thing is no longer just a remarkable political fact but a kind of national love affair, which cannot be analyzed satisfactorily by the political scientists and will probably have to be turned over to the head-shrinkers.”3
Reston’s language was music to the ears of Republican strategists, but it also spoke to a problem: much of the public chalked these positive developments up to Eisenhower personally, not the party he led. It followed that Republicans would be vulnerable without him. And indeed, polls in midyear showed that with any other standard-bearer the GOP would likely lose the presidency the following autumn, and perhaps hemorrhage seats in Congress as well. Accordingly, in the days leading up to the heart attack, party officials had been leaning hard on the president to announce his candidacy; afterwards, they chewed their fingernails and waited for a clear prognosis. Gradually, Eisenhower’s condition improved, but he remained coy about his intentions. To press secretary James Hagerty he confided privately that none of his most likely Republican successors, including Vice President Richard Nixon, had what it took to lead the nation, while on the Democratic side the picture seemed to him equally grim—1952 nominee and former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, New York governor Averell Harriman, and Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, the three likely front-runners, simply “did not have the competency to run the office of President.”4
An uncharitable assessment, and in any case several Democrats were suddenly liking their chances. Whereas in earlier weeks they had been content to tell Stevenson that he must carry the party’s banner in the election, now they turned circumspect and quietly took soundings about their own prospects. Stevenson, recognizing the danger, worked to shore up support, including among southern party stalwarts who had been lukewarm to him in 1952.5 The burst of activity did not escape the attention of the press, which now ramped up the discussion of potential candidates for the second slot on the Democratic ticket. Numerous names were floated, among them the junior senator from Massachusetts. Stevenson, though he had long been leery of Joseph Kennedy, finding him pushy and overbearing, could see the advantages of having the Ambassador’s son as a running mate, even as he also considered him too young and inexperienced for the role. In particular, Jack Kennedy could counter Eisenhower’s surprising strength (as reflected in the 1952 returns) among Catholic Democrats unhappy with Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman for failing to thwart Communist expansion in Eastern Europe and Asia. The Catholic vote was a weak spot for Stevenson—he knew it, everyone knew it. Nor did it help him with these voters that he was divorced, and that he struggled to connect with the blue-collar concerns that animated many of them. In addition, Kennedy would bring some geographic balance to the ticket, if not of the preferred southern variety. It all constituted a pretty formidable cluster of attributes, the Illinois man conceded.
II
Even so, the speculations about a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket were as yet scattershot and fragmentary, more notable in hindsight than they were at the time. But they were significant enough to get the attention of the Kennedy family, as well as Jack’s senior aides. Already on September 12, eleven days before the president’s heart attack, Ted Sorensen had written the senator in Cap d’Antibes to alert him to rumors that the Stevenson camp considered him an attractive potential running mate.6 A few days before that, Joseph Kennedy, who was also in the South of France for his annual summer sojourn, sent a letter to son Teddy:
Last night we went to the Gala at Monte Carlo and Jack arrived early and dressed in my room. As usual, he arrived without his studs, with two different stockings and no underpants; so he walked off with a pair of brand new Sulka stockings of mine, a new pair of Sulka underpants of mine, and the last pair of evening studs I possessed….He is back on crutches after having tried to open a screen in his hotel room, but if he hasn’t any more brains than to try that, maybe he should stay on crutches. His general attitude towards life seems to be quite gay. He is very intrigued with the constant rumors that he is being considered for the Vice Presidency, which idea I think is one of the silliest I have heard in a long time for Jack.7
Jack was then in the second month of his European trip, begun immediately after Congress went into recess. Jackie had come, too, but in the early going the two were in separate locales. Over the previous months the marriage had shown renewed signs of strain as the closeness engendered by his illness and recovery wore off. Jack had resumed his long work hours and heavy speaking schedule, and Jackie spent much of her time house-hunting. In early July, while her husband was still stateside, she had set off for London, where her sister, Lee, and Lee’s husband, Michael Canfield, lived in a chic apartment in upscale Belgravia. (Michael, the adopted son of Harper & Brothers publisher Cass Canfield, who would soon bring out Jack’s book Profiles in Courage, served as private secretary to Winthrop W. Aldrich, the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.) The sisters were, as always, thick as thieves, delighting in each other’s company and hitting the London social scene, the ultra-stylish Lee turning as many heads as her sister. At the end of July, Jackie and Lee traveled to Paris and from there to the Riviera, where Canfi
eld, having rented a flat for them in Antibes, joined them.8
Jack, meanwhile, accompanied by Torby Macdonald, boarded the SS United States in New York and made for Le Havre, in Normandy, arriving on August 10. From there the two continued on immediately to Båstad, a coastal resort town in southwestern Sweden, where Jack had arranged to rendezvous with Gunilla von Post at the Hotel Skånegården. Since their abortive get-together the previous summer, they had exchanged letters, including during Kennedy’s convalescence in Florida. He asked if she would come to the United States; she countered by saying he should visit her in Sweden. He relented, writing, “My plans are your plans.” In another letter he said that although the trip would be “a long way to Gunilla—it is worth it.” In July 1955, according to von Post, he called her and they firmed up their plan to meet in Båstad the following month. A confirmation letter soon followed, addressed to von Post at her parents’ home in Stockholm—Gunilla’s mother read it to her over the phone.9
“I rushed toward Jack, my heart pounding,” she later wrote of the moment she first saw him on August 11, “and fell into his arms. We held each other tightly. I was so happy to see him. No words could express my feelings.” She had an overpowering sense that he felt as strongly for her as she felt for him; why else would he travel all this way to be with her, at considerable risk to his health and his career? “I was relatively inexperienced,” she went on, “and Jack’s tenderness was a revelation. He said, ‘Gunilla, we’ve waited two years for this. It seems almost too good to be true, and I want to make you happy.’ For the first time, I could let go and luxuriate in the attentions of a man who not only respected and cared for me but clearly loved me. I fully trusted him.”10
Macdonald, for his part, met a Swedish woman soon after arriving, and the quartet spent an idyllic week together motoring by rental car around Skåne, the country’s southernmost province, which is dotted with old manor houses and churches, and which Kennedy thought reminiscent of Ireland and—along the coast—of Cape Cod. “What’s that?” he would exclaim excitedly from behind the wheel about this or that landmark, and they would get out and have a look, he often relying on crutches. Gunilla introduced him to her friends and family, who were dazzled by this charming and handsome politician (a “senator,” no less) from America. “He cast a spell on people that I’ve never quite seen before or since. And everyone—man, woman, child—was smitten, and happy to be near him.” Gunilla’s mother and father apparently approved of the adulterous romance, so long as marriage might be in the offing. At no point did Kennedy talk with Gunilla about his wife, but Macdonald did, murmuring to her that Jack was unhappy in his marriage and much freer and more himself around her than around Jackie. In Gunilla’s telling, the glorious week ended with a traditional Swedish crayfish party at a grand estate near Ystad, followed by a night of tender romance and her suitor telling her, repeatedly, “I love you, Gunilla. I adore you. I’m crazy about you and I’ll do everything I can to be with you.”11
From Sweden, Kennedy flew to Nice to meet up with Jackie and the Canfields at Cap d’Antibes. The last time he was here, two years before, he had been with Gunilla, cooing in her ear in the nighttime breeze at Cap-Eden-Roc. Now, while he waited for Jackie to arrive, he wrote to Gunilla to suggest another meeting soon. The reunion with his wife, he said, would be “complicated by the way I feel now—my Swedish flicka [girl]. All I have done is sit in the sun and look at the ocean and think of Gunilla….All love, Jack.” The Kennedys and the Canfields soon joined up with William Douglas-Home and his wife, Rachel, for numerous days of lazing in the sun followed by evenings on the town. The Douglas-Homes took to Jackie immediately, appreciating her quick wit and intelligence. Asked later by biographer Sarah Bradford how the Kennedys got on with each other, William said it was hard to tell, because the marriage was not demonstrative. “Nothing with Jack would have been like that. So you wouldn’t see them hugging and loving each other, holding hands, ever. There wasn’t that kind of thing.” Yet Jackie seemed happy with her husband, William Douglas-Home thought. “She wasn’t demonstrative but she did love him, and they had this relationship which was fun, you’d have fun in their company, there’d be a lot of jokes and she used to tease him. It was good being with them. It was fun. But as I’ve said, they weren’t a lovey-dovey couple.”12
Jack certainly got plenty of reminders on the trip of how valuable Jackie could be to him in his dealings with world leaders. She translated for him during a meeting with senior French officials and won accolades from them and others for her elegance and her obvious familiarity with the country’s history and art. “She had all the wit and the seductive charms of an eighteenth-century courtesan,” Clare Boothe Luce later commented of Jackie’s interactions with Old World luminaries. “Men just melted when she gazed at them with those gigantic eyes. The Europeans were not immune to this.”13
According to von Post, Kennedy called her a few weeks later from Poland and said he had spoken with his father about divorcing Jackie so he could marry her, to which the elder Kennedy, he said, had responded, “You’re out of your mind.”14 That Jack Kennedy might have said this to his Swedish lover on the phone is plausible; that he actually had such a conversation with his father is much less so. In the middle months of 1955 his political prospects were bright, brighter than they’d ever been before. The top rung of the ladder might even be within his reach at some point. Jack did not need his father to tell him that divorcing his young wife (of just two years, no less), especially after all the glowing press coverage their union had received, would almost certainly cause it all to fall apart. For a Catholic politician, whose church insisted on the inviolability of the marital vow, the risks were greater still. If father indeed spoke to son, he only stated what the son surely already knew.
Von Post’s parents, sensing their daughter would likely be consigned to permanent mistress status, now intervened and compelled her to end the relationship. Soon thereafter, Gunilla became engaged to a Swede and in short order married. As he had with Inga Arvad after that relationship ended, Kennedy continued to keep in touch. “I had a wonderful time last summer with you,” read one letter, penned on U.S. Senate stationery, in 1956. “It is a bright memory in my life—you are wonderful and I miss you.”15
III
In early October 1955, Jack and Jackie Kennedy set sail for home, arriving in New York on the twelfth. Immediately, Jack headed for the Manhattan office of Dr. Janet Travell, an expert on pain management he had first visited a few months before. The muscle spasms in his lower left back had been bad on the trip, he told her, radiating out to his left leg and making him unable to put weight on it; he had been compelled to use crutches much of the time. He often could not reach his left foot to pull on a sock or sit in a low chair. Travell, in their earlier meeting, had determined that the left side of Kennedy’s body was smaller than his right—the left side of his face was smaller, his left shoulder was lower, and his left leg significantly shorter. Astonishingly, in all the years of medical treatment, no previous doctor had ever detected the problem, which, with every step, caused a vacillating movement and generated strain in the spinal muscles. Upon initial diagnosis, Travell had prescribed lifts for Jack’s left shoes and a lowered heel for his right, while also injecting him with procaine, more commonly known as Novocain. She now increased the dosage and suggested new exercises, then sent the patient on his way.
Kennedy found he liked Travell a great deal, liked the combination of her gentle woman’s touch and her authoritative demeanor, backed by top credentials; in the weeks to come, he would regularly slip out of Washington for a day and fly up to have an appointment with her. She considered him a model patient—accepting of, or at least not resentful of, his condition, always game to try any regimen that seemed reasonable.16
Travell’s efforts seemed to pay off. By the end of the year her patient was up to 168 pounds, his most ever, and he felt better than he had in a long tim
e. His features had filled out, matured, as had his voice; he no longer looked or sounded younger than his years.
Back on the job in Washington, fall 1955.
Jackie, for her part, suffered a physical setback of her own. On a fall weekend in Hyannis Port, she gamely agreed to play in the family’s usual football scrimmage. Going out for a pass, she tripped and fell, crying out in pain. At New England Baptist Hospital, doctors confirmed an ankle fracture and kept her for five days, outfitting her with a cast below the knee. While recovering at her mother’s Merrywood estate, in Northern Virginia, Jackie carried on the house hunt she had begun in the late spring before departing for Europe. Something kept bringing her back to Hickory Hill, a large three-story brick Georgian Colonial home in McLean, with guest quarters, stables, and a pool. The Potomac River ran nearby. She loved the tall trees and the rolling hills and the stables (she still liked to ride when circumstances permitted), and Jack was tickled by the historical connections: during the Civil War it had been General George B. McClellan’s command post. They closed on the property for $125,000, and Jackie set about remodeling the main house extensively. Maybe, she thought, this could be the home that would make their marriage a happy one, where they could raise a family and live for the rest of their lives. Here, too, the close of 1955 brought happy news: Jackie found out she was pregnant.17
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