Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  “What’s that army doing out there?” the President asked.

  “Shielding your children,” I answered. He shook his head.

  “I hope it doesn’t obstruct the tourists’ view of the house,” he said, seriously.

  The first flak came from the Washington newspapers. And the second barrage came from the White House police.

  “What in the world are you doing out by the southwest gate?” Major Stover demanded to know.

  I explained the First Lady’s wishes.

  “What? How the hell do you expect us to guard this place if we can’t see who’s climbing over the fence?” he sputtered.

  “I guess you’ll just have to find a way,” I answered evenly. “It’s Mrs. Kennedy’s request, not mine.”

  With much grumbling, the police put another man on post at the gate. Then they electrified the fence. But that didn’t work because the alarm went off every time a bird flew over. Finally we were able to install ground lights among the bushes, and the police, at last, quit complaining about the rhododendrons.

  Mrs. Kennedy, though, never was satisfied that Caroline and John were sufficiently screened from the public scrutiny. Yet those two were the most photographed American children since Shirley Temple. Every magazine, every newspaper, every television news show carried pictures of Caroline and John. What the public didn’t realize was that Mrs. Kennedy carefully planned and directed all the publicity that the children received.

  This apparent contradiction was puzzling, but I do believe that she was sincere about abhorring publicity. When she married John F. Kennedy, she married into a family that actively courted publicity, whose political success depended upon becoming known. President Kennedy was acutely conscious of the news media. His best friends were reporters, and he held sixteen stag luncheons for newspaper publishers from every state of the Union.

  So Mrs. Kennedy had to fight a constant battle between her own desire for privacy and her husband’s continuous campaign. And she also learned to exercise control over her children’s exposure to the news media in a very subtle way. As a former journalist herself, she knew that she had to give the press something on her children, or else they would hound her to pieces or write articles that she didn’t want. And so she would think up little stories, or agree to certain photographs, and filter them to the press via Pam Turnure. As long as she was the director, it was all right.

  She guarded her own social life in the White House as jealously as she guarded that of her children, and invited “working” press only to those elaborate private parties—such as the one for forty-nine Nobel Prize winners or for André Malraux, France’s Minister of Culture—which she deemed to be in the “national interest.” The others—the dinner dances until dawn or the intimate little parties on the second floor—were strictly off the record.

  The Kennedys entertained often, and rather lavishly, at their private dinner-dances—certainly more lavishly than any of their predecessors. They simply had more money of their own to spend. We set up a bar between the Red Room and the Blue Room, served cocktails and hors d’oeuvres in the Red and Green Rooms, where the President and his wife wandered around as host and hostess.

  Lester Lanin and about twelve members of his orchestra played sprightly, nonstop music in the Blue Room, from eight o’clock cocktail hour to the last gasp before dawn. (“Tell them I don’t want any ‘breaks,’” Mrs. Kennedy said. “They can figure out how to do it without breaking their union rules.”) After dinner, the guests had coffee and liqueurs in the Red and Green Rooms, and danced on the gleaming oak floors of the candle-lit Blue Room.

  I noticed that Vice President and Mrs. Johnson were often on the guest list for those private parties, which was unusual only in that my Presidents rarely included their Vice Presidents in their private lives. Mr. Truman’s Vice President Barkley, I believe, came closest to being a personal friend. I had the feeling that the Vice Presidents all were chosen to balance the ticket and not the White House social life.

  The order of the Kennedys’ big, private evenings in the State Dining Room, the decor, and the menu followed the plan for black-tie State entertaining, because Mrs. Kennedy couldn’t abide “theme” parties.

  Though those swinging private dinner-dances were the talk of Washington, the most envied White House invitations were those hidden from the public entirely, the intimate little black-tie dinners with Mrs. Kennedy as hostess, upstairs in the new President’s Dining Room.

  She used candlelight, antique china, and had René prepare his gourmet specialties. And even when only two people were dining, the chef scrupulously followed his State dinner pattern of four courses: fish, entrée, salad, dessert. Tish prepared place cards, and seated all dinners and luncheons—even for only a few people.

  For their intimate upstairs dinners—for four to twenty—the guests were rarely politicians, not even members of the Cabinet (with the exception of the President’s brother, the Attorney General, and his wife), nor were they members of his family. Their most frequent visitors were newspaper people: old Georgetown friends Benjamin Bradlee, then of Newsweek, and his wife, Toni; Charles Bartlett of the Chattanooga Times and his wife Martha; artist-author William Walton.

  Mrs. Kennedy purposely selected visitors from the arts and from the entertainment world, rather than politicians or statesmen—with the exception of their long-time British friend Ambassador David Ormsby-Gore (Lord Harlech).

  “I want my husband to be able to leave the office, even for a few hours,” she told me. “I want to surround him with bright people who can hold his interest, and divert his mind from what’s going on over there!”

  These dinners set a trend in town, and Washington all but abandoned its huge, crushing cocktail parties in an attempt to follow the Kennedy style—black-tie meals for twelve, with after-dinner dancing in the living room, hostess gowns, French cooking. Lobbyists and labor leaders, merchants and secretaries began copying the sophisticated mode of entertaining favored by Mrs. Kennedy and her Georgetown friends. Social life sparkled.

  But Mrs. Kennedy didn’t entertain her own friends in the White House. She put them to work.

  The women who worked for Mrs. Kennedy—either in the White House or on the Committee for Fine Arts—were women who had grown up in the same social milieu, who reflected her tastes, and who knew how to achieve the particular life style to which the President’s wife had always been accustomed. Her two social secretaries, Tish Baldrige and Nancy Tuckerman, and Caroline’s nursery-school teacher, Betsy Boyd, all were graduates of Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut—as was Mrs. Kennedy. Tish, Betsy, and housekeeper Anne Lincoln were graduates of Vassar College, as was Mrs. Kennedy. And another schoolmate, Janet Felton, who’d attended grades one through six at Miss Chapin’s school with Jacqueline Bouvier, was in line for a White House job.

  “I certainly could use her to work with the Fine Arts Committee,” Mrs. Kennedy said. “Actually, Janet would be great, because she’ll know instantly whether I’d agree, and you won’t have to bother me as much….”

  The salary for a secretary was only $6,300 per year.

  “Do you think she will be able to accept?” I asked delicately. (One of her other friends couldn’t afford to move to Washington.)

  “Oh, it won’t matter, she has a private income,” Mrs. Kennedy answered.

  So Janet Felton came down for her official interview at a time when Mrs. Kennedy was entertaining Henry Francis du Pont, chairman of the Fine Arts Committee.

  “May we invite Miss Felton?” I suggested. “It will be a good time for her to meet Mr. du Pont.”

  “Oh, she already knows him,” Mrs. Kennedy replied. “They’re old family friends.”

  Mrs. Kennedy didn’t seek out the companionship of other women. She had no clique who came by for canasta or Spanish lessons, no confidantes in the outside world, except perhaps her sister, Lee Radziwill, with whom she spoke frequently over transatlantic telephone.

  Her sisters-in-law,
the Kennedy “clan,” never stopped by for lunch, nor did the women who came with their husbands to the private evenings-with-friends. She seemed to enjoy being in the company of men far more than she enjoyed women, and often invited men, usually older men who were involved in the arts, to tea in the mansion. When she was hostess at large functions, private as well as official, she held long, animated conversations with male guests, and had few words for their wives.

  Nancy Tuckerman, her second social secretary, I believe, came closest to being a confidante. Yet I always felt that Mrs. Kennedy let nobody come really close to her, despite all her jocular ways, despite the easy informality with which she greeted, teased, and talked with her friends.

  When she entertained her sister, who lived in London, it was always a production, as if entertaining a visiting dignitary. Princess Radziwill slept in the Queen’s Room, her husband in the Lincoln bedroom. The Radziwill children stayed in the White House only once; during other visits, they stayed at Merrywood and in Georgetown with Mrs. Kennedy’s mother, Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss.

  Mrs. Auchincloss came to the White House for special occasions. She was always available to help her daughter, standing in for her at functions when the First Lady couldn’t attend, or taking the children for a weekend. Nevertheless, Mrs. Kennedy seemed to me to be rather formal with her mother.

  The First Lady’s relationship with Mrs. Joseph Kennedy was not particularly close, either. The President’s mother, a very religious woman, was always sending prayers, rosary beads, and religious artifacts to her son and his family. And Rose Kennedy came to the White House more often when her daughter-in-law was away, than when she was in residence. The Ambassador’s wife acted as hostess for her son at official functions during those times, and she was definitely in charge when her son visited her.

  As she wrote to the White House:

  When the President used the house in Palm Beach late last spring, after we had gone, a lot of dirty dishes, pots and pans, and linens were left strewn around the kitchen. I should appreciate it if you would tell the staff to leave everything clean in the future, as we have had trouble with rodents.

  Please use your own judgment when you speak with them, because I do not want them to think that our help are complaining. Thank you.

  Sincerely,

  /s/ Rose Kennedy

  Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy

  One exception to the arm’s-length distance between Jacqueline Kennedy and her family was her feeling for the “Ambassador,” Joseph P. Kennedy. When the President’s father came to visit, she fairly danced down the halls, arm-in-arm with him, laughing uproariously at his teasing. Her face was animated and happy, as it was when she was playing with her children.

  When the Ambassador suffered loss of speech and partial paralysis, Mrs. Kennedy was more distressed than I had ever seen her; when he came for a visit to the White House several months later, she took pains to provide for his every comfort, sending me a seven-page memo with detailed instructions for his accommodations and those of his nurse. While the stricken Ambassador was staying at the White House, Mrs. Kennedy spent every possible moment with him, though he could not communicate.

  The Kennedys’ most frequent guest was Lemoyne Billings, the President’s old roommate at Choate school. Lem, a bachelor, was always at the White House. A close friend and outside the government, he appeared to provide comic relief. Along with the Boston-Irish politician Dave Powers, Lem Billings was court jester at the Great Hall.

  When the Kennedys first moved into the White House, Lem came down every weekend, and just moved into his room without anybody ever knowing he was coming. (Maybe the President knew it, but nothing was ever said about it.)

  One Friday, as Mrs. Kennedy was preparing to send Caroline’s pony, Macaroni, down to Virginia for the weekend, I mentioned to her that Lem Billings had arrived. (He was one of the few people who joined the Kennedys on their weekends in the country.)

  “Oh, Mr. West,” she whispered in mock despair. “He’s been a houseguest of mine every weekend since I’ve been married.”

  4

  THE PRESIDENT AND HIS wife were gone from the White House every weekend, with the exception of national emergencies, from Friday night until Monday morning. They were accustomed to many homes. They had their own house in Hyannis, and visited frequently with President Kennedy’s father in Palm Beach. We found, however, that the Ambassador’s home wasn’t big enough to accommodate all the entourage and accoutrements of the Presidency: Secret Service, electronics equipment, staff and friends, and the Kennedys had to rent another Palm Beach house.

  When President Kennedy was a Massachusetts Senator, he went to Hyannis every weekend, or in the winter to Palm Beach, which gave him a reputation as a “four-day Senator.”

  Knowing that becoming a “four-day President” wouldn’t go over too well with his slim majority, they selected a retreat closer to Washington. The President acceded to his wife’s interest in riding and rented Glen Ora, Mrs. Raymond Tartiere’s French villa in the wealthy Virginia fox-hunting country.

  The Eisenhowers had used Camp David, the Presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, so frequently that the Kennedys, without even a look at the place, knew they wouldn’t enjoy it. Mrs. Kennedy selected Glen Ora even before the Inauguration, and she had “Sister” Parish redecorate the country home at the same time she was planning the second floor of the White House.

  After storing Mrs. Tartiere’s furnishings in the White House warehouse, she swept through the rented villa to the tune of $10,000, including wallpaper, paint, rugs, curtains, and furniture. When she was finished, the President raised hell.

  Mrs. Parish came to me with the bill.

  “Mrs. Kennedy wants to know if there’s any way the government can pay for this,” she said.

  “Absolutely not,” I declared, thinking of Camp David and the enormous cost of running a perfectly good Presidential retreat. “It has to be a personal expense. The government can’t pay a penny of it.”

  Mrs. Kennedy loved Glen Ora. She could ride horseback through the rolling Virginia pastures—the one place she could go without the Secret Service at her side. (They were probably hiding in the bushes, though. The government did pay for surveillance equipment, White House police posts and rest quarters and Secret Service stations to surround Glen Ora.) There could be no more casual riding through Rock Creek Park, as Eleanor Roosevelt had done. But Jacqueline Kennedy did get to ride at Glen Ora every weekend. The children played happily there, President Kennedy swam in the Olympic-sized pool, with its elegant French poolhouse, and they enjoyed a little of the privacy Mrs. Kennedy had been seeking.

  Then the President and Mrs. Tartiere had a falling-out and the Kennedys had to leave Glen Ora and spend another sum to decorate it exactly as it had been before. And Mrs. Kennedy, Secret Service in tow, began looking for other houses in Virginia, but she found none that she really wanted. So she decided to build one.

  While Wexford (the new house on Rattlesnake Mountain named for President Kennedy’s ancestral county in Ireland) was under construction, the Kennedys weekended at Camp David. And, to their surprise, they liked the government’s Presidential retreat. The young President’s wife found that she could have her horses brought in vans, and the riding was as fine as it was in Virginia.

  “If only I’d realized how nice Camp David really is, I’d never have rented Glen Ora, or built Wexford,” she wistfully told me.

  Built as President Roosevelt’s Shangri-La, the secret mountaintop retreat, surrounded by forest, is miles from civilization. Yet it is like a little resort—with swimming pool, bowling alleys, movie theater, cabins for guests and police, and breathtaking views. When the Eisenhowers redecorated it from the rustic mountain lodge President Roosevelt enjoyed, they made it super-secure.

  Glen Ora had only a makeshift bomb shelter, and Wexford’s, while it met the grudging approval of the Secret Service, was hardly better than one of those hastily dug by thousands
of American homeowners during the Cuban missile crisis. This lack of total security may also have been one of the reasons President Kennedy didn’t like Wexford.

  But I honestly don’t know why he didn’t care for his new country home. Nor could I understand why he didn’t speak his mind about it until after the expensive country estate was finished.

  I was puzzled that the man who fretted over every little detail of White House decorating—the size of rugs, the color of walls, what the public might think—would not take the time to approve his own home, to go over details and make sure the place was to his liking. I only know that he spent only two or three weekends at Wexford, and kept going back to Camp David even after his new home was finished.

  Mrs. Kennedy and I were in the back seat of the White House station wagon, on our way to the Virginia warehouse to find some of her stored furniture for Wexford.

  “Mr. West, has a President ever sold a house while he was in office?” she whispered.

  “Not that I remember,” I said.

  “Well, do you have any idea what the repercussions would be if we were to sell Wexford?”

  “You’d probably get twice what you paid for it,” I said, and she laughed. But I could tell that the wheels were turning.

  Because Jacqueline Kennedy did want to please her husband.

  In public, and even in front of the staff, John F. Kennedy and his wife were rather formal and correct with each other, as if the marriage were another of their press agent’s concoctions. Yet the discreet White House staff, which always must know when to stay away from the second floor, was attuned to the intimacy that actually existed between the young couple. The Kennedys’ early afternoons, while the children were napping, were spent in absolute privacy. Quite often, music was heard floating out into the hall, from the stereo that Mrs. Kennedy had installed in the passageway between her bedroom and her husband’s. And many a morning, when George Thomas, whose job it was to wake Mr. Kennedy, would find him absent from his bedroom, the valet would tiptoe into the room next door, and gently shake the President—so as not to awaken the President’s wife.