by Unknown
Eventually he moved to sit on the edge of the bed, and took off his shoes. He needed help with his shirt to protect his back and, by this point in our relationship, was fully aware that I would come over to help without his having to ask. And I did.
I can’t say our relationship was romantic. It was sexual, it was intimate, it was passionate. But there was always a layer of reserve between us, which may explain why we never once kissed. The wide gulf between us—the age, the power, the experience—guaranteed that our affair wouldn’t evolve into anything more serious. Nor did I harbor illusions that it would.
I knew my role and played it well. I was good company to him, in part because he hated to be alone but also because he found a change of pace in someone like me—young, full of energy, willing to play along with whatever he wanted.
We joked about members of the press office staff and who was saying what about whom in the press corps. The President loved gossip, the juicier the better. He also loved to laugh. One day he surprised me by asking if I knew any school songs from my days at Miss Porter’s. It was an odd request, but I obliged. As I began to sing one, he started chuckling. It wasn’t the response I was going for, but I understood why. Beyond my froggy singing voice, he just couldn’t resist a girl with a little bit of Social Register in her background.
Friends never hesitate to ask if I was in love with President Kennedy. My guarded answer has always been “I don’t think so.” But the truth is, “Of course I was.” This was one part hero worship, one part schoolgirl crush, one part the thrill of being so close to power—and it was a potent, heady mix. Then there was the spike in my self-esteem that I felt whenever I was with him; I simply felt more alive—more special—in his company. But I want to be clear: I knew the situation. I knew that ours wasn’t a partnership of equals, and that my love would go unrequited. He was the leader of the free world, after all. The married leader of the free world. And I wasn’t even old enough to vote.
After Yosemite, we flew to Los Angeles, and I was moved into the Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills. The President spent Saturday and Sunday afternoon with his sister Pat and brother-in-law Peter Lawford, at their beach house in Santa Monica while I remained at the hotel, playing the Waiting Game until he returned to see me in the evenings. This wasn’t exactly a hardship. The hotel, with its gorgeous grounds and enormous swimming pool, had more than enough diversions to keep me occupied.
The return from California to Washington was the one and only time I flew on Air Force One. It was a fluke, really; a seat had opened up when a staffer returned to Washington early, and it was offered to me. As was the custom for all passengers on Air Force One, I boarded the plane well ahead of the President. I sat in the rear, just in front of the kitchen, along with other junior staffers. A conference room was between us and the President’s section, where seating was reserved for the inner circle—in this case, Kenny O’Donnell, Dave Powers, Pierre Salinger, and Larry O’Brien, the President’s liaison with Congress, as well as Secretary Udall. The seats were roomy and plush, and everything bore the presidential seal. It would have been normal for any first-time passenger to take a souvenir—a napkin, a coaster, a matchbook—but I didn’t want to feel like an ordinary visitor, so I resisted.
I went on one other trip with the President that summer, to places a little less scenic than Yosemite and Beverly Hills. The space race with the Soviet Union was high on his agenda, and he was determined that the United States be the first country to land a man on the moon. So the itinerary included the nation’s major air and space facilities: the National Aeronautics and Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama; Cape Canaveral in Florida; the new manned space flight center in Houston; and finally the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation in Saint Louis, where parts for NASA’s Mercury and Gemini programs were made. This was a nonstop two-day tour with only one overnight in Houston. Once again I flew on the support plane, which was packed with VIPs: Vice President Lyndon Johnson was there, as were Cyrus Vance, the secretary of the Army, James Webb, the director of NASA, and somewhat incongruously, the radio and TV
personality Arthur Godfrey, who was a pilot and an ardent voice for the airline industry.
The trip was a blur of arrivals and departures. My most vivid memory was the appearance of Vice President Johnson at my seat on the Florida-to-Houston leg of the trip. Johnson, towering above me, politely introduced himself as I struggled, unsuccessfully, to free myself of my seat belt and stand up. When I told the President later that night at the hotel that I’d met his vice president, he seemed to lose his composure for a split second. “Stay away from him,” he said.
At the time I found his response odd, but I realize now that he might have been alarmed that I had slipped out of the private compartment he had put me in. He might have worried that a politician as savvy as Lyndon Johnson—a living testament to the maxim “Knowledge is power”—could figure out who I was and why I was aboard and possibly use it to his advantage.
As the time approached for me to go back to Wheaton for my sophomore year, I pleaded with my parents to let me drop out and stay in Washington. They didn’t seem concerned that I was willing to abandon my education for a lowly job—that is, if I could get one when my internship was up—at the White House.
I wouldn’t be the first person to be seduced by proximity to power or the glamour of the Kennedy Administration. Kennedy insiders called it “White House Fever,” and as far as I could tell, everyone who worked there was afflicted with it. My parents assumed I had fallen in love with politics and that I was pursuing my true calling; they certainly didn’t suspect that I had other, far more personal, reasons for staying in Washington. Ultimately, though, they vetoed my plan for financial reasons: They’d already paid my tuition for the year, and they weren’t willing to throw that money away.
I understood, but I wasn’t happy. I had experienced a liberating, exhilarating summer, and the thought of going back to Wheaton, a quiet all-girls college with strict rules, was depressing.
When I told the President about my plans, he promised to call me often when I was back at school. When I pointed out that such a call might create problems for him, he said he had already considered that. He would use the pseudonym Michael Carter. He teased me that my return to college was more like abandonment—of him. Then he would cue up Nat King Cole’s version of “Autumn Leaves” on the stereo in the residence, making me pay close attention when the lyrics came to, “But I miss you most of all, my darling, when autumn leaves start to fall.” He had a mushy sentimental streak and wasn’t afraid to show it.
Just before I left, I bought him another copy of that record. I trimmed the cover with leaves I’d collected in a park, and gave it to him as a farewell present.
“You’re trying to make me cry,” he said.
“I’m not trying to make you cry, Mr. President,” I said. “I’m trying to make sure you remember me.”
Chapter Eight
To my surprise, the President did remember me.
In mid-September 1962, I was firmly back in school, having moved into the sophomore dormitory at Wheaton, and started classes. Within a week I received my first phone call from Michael Carter.
Even with all the meetings and public appearances in his day, President Kennedy was known to average fifty telephone calls a day, many before he left the residence in the morning or when he returned in the evening. The phone, he told me, was his lifeline to the everyday world. When we were together at the White House, he was always calling friends, members of Congress, his brothers and sisters. He was incapable of sitting still, or of not using a moment of free time to scavenge for information or a good laugh, some form of human connection.
He called me in the evening when he knew I would be in my room and, presumably, when he was alone. There were no phones in our dorm rooms, however; we received calls on a house phone in a closet on the first floor. The President would call that number. Sometimes the girl on phone duty would yell the caller’s name. The Pr
esident’s Boston pronunciation of “Carter” sounded more like “Cotta” and that’s the name that would be broadcast down the hall:
“Mimi Beardsley, Michael Cotta for you.”
Amazingly, no one ever recognized his voice. When I came on the line, he always seemed completely unworried about being identified. He had a keen sense of what he could risk, how far he could push his behavior, and at what point he would be legitimately vulnerable or exposed. His survival instincts must have told him that no young women would suspect that a man named
“Michael Carter” on a dormitory phone could possibly be the President of the United States.
The President would pepper me with a million little questions over the phone, as if he had all the time in the world: What were the courses I was taking? Were the teachers good? What was I reading? Were the girls interesting? What did they talk about? What did I have for dinner? It was so like him. In temperament, he was an inexhaustibly, relentlessly curious man. He would poke and prod anyone—from cabinet members to assistants—who could supply him with fresh information, a bit of news.
Evidently, that insatiable curiosity extended to the sophomore class at Wheaton.
My stories about college life seemed to amuse him; he always listened patiently, was never curt with me, never sounded unengaged. He acted like he had all the time in the world for my stories. When he asked specifically about my social life, I resisted the urge to sound more interesting and make up dates with young men that never happened. The truth was I still didn’t have a social life—a couple of blind dates here and there but nothing that made a lasting impression. What college sophomore could stand a chance against the President?
Perhaps he enjoyed talking to me precisely because I was so young and naïve.
We didn’t talk politics or national security or the news of the day. I didn’t bother him with questions about life in the White House or his plans for the weekend. I simply talked about my life and its simple day-to-day dilemmas—dealing with a difficult dorm mate or a dull teacher—and he seemed to find some relief in this.
“When can you come to Washington?” the President inevitably asked at the end of each conversation. I would pull out my calendar, and we would make a date.
From there, Dave Powers would handle all the arrangements. A car service would pick me up at my dorm and drive me three hours to LaGuardia airport in New York. On the way down, I would catch up on some school reading and stop at a beauty parlor in Rhode Island to have my hair washed and combed out while the car waited. When I arrived at LaGuardia, there would be a prepaid ticket waiting for me at the Eastern Airlines shuttle desk, and after landing at National (now Reagan) Airport in Washington, I would be greeted by a driver holding a sign reading “Michael Carter.” Off we’d go to the White House.
I think of this image often, fifty years later: me in the backseat of a black limousine in 1962, catching up on homework, shutting out the fact that I was nineteen and on my way to the nation’s capital for the purpose of hopping into bed with the President. That kind of duality was so like me then: the obedient daughter running through her checklist of things to do, no matter what else was happening around her. I guess I knew a little bit about compartmentalizing, too.
Only when I was in the limousine, on the way to the White House, did my thoughts turn to the President. I’d check my hair and face in the compact mirror in my purse, although I still didn’t wear any makeup or lipstick. I’d rehearse an item or two that I wanted to share with the President. The “White House Fever” that had made me want to abandon college for a job in Washington had not dissipated; it was simply hidden away, a big secret that I couldn’t share with anyone at Wheaton. I kept myself busy maintaining a B-plus average. I was either in class, in the library, or in the dorm. But as I was on the bridge crossing the Potomac River from Virginia to the District of Columbia and the White House came into view, those old feelings would come back to me powerfully. It was then that I realized how much I missed the people at the White House, and the vitality I felt there.
Oddly, my trips to Washington never raised any suspicion among my friends at school. The college insisted that all girls sign out in a log book at the front door of the dorm whenever we left campus, indicating where we were going, where we were staying, and when we planned to return. My teachers and the dean of students were so impressed by the White House as my destination that they never questioned where I was going to stay. If anyone asked, I’d tell them I was staying “with a girlfriend in Georgetown,” adding that the White House press office always needed extra help on the weekends. While the part about the White House needing help may have been technically accurate, it wasn’t true for me. I rarely visited the press office on my trips there. I spent my time in the residence.
On my second “date” trip to Washington, in October 1962, I was greeted on Saturday afternoon by a President who was not his usual ebullient self. He was tense and quiet and preoccupied, with dark bags under his eyes—and for the first half-hour together I wondered why I’d been asked to come down to be with him. That night, he was distracted and on the phone constantly.
He had a lot on his mind. A few days earlier, on October 1, after a series of legal challenges that ended in the U.S. Supreme Court, James Meredith had become the first black student to be admitted to the University of Mississippi. When Meredith showed up for class, however, he was physically barred from entering the university by the state’s governor and lieutenant governor, forcing President Kennedy to take legal action against the governor and send military personnel to the university to protect Meredith. Riots followed in which two people died, but in the end Meredith took his first class at Ole Miss and the President had demonstrated his resolve on a major social issue that he had been avoiding since his inauguration. As a result, his approval ratings had shot way up. By all rights, he should have been a happy man when I arrived.
But what I didn’t know at the time was that the President was in the middle of what would become the most dramatic and tense episode of his presidency: the Cuban Missile Crisis.
When I left him that Sunday, I didn’t hear from him for the next two weeks, which was highly unusual. I wasn’t aware, of course, that during this time the President had authorized U-2 spy planes to fly over Cuba, revealing that the Soviets were secretly building bases for nuclear missiles only ninety miles from the U.S. mainland. But by October 22, the news had broken, and I finally understood. It was a Monday morning in my comparative government class when Professor Minton F. Goldman interrupted his lecture to open a discussion about the President’s scheduled speech to the nation that night at seven o’clock. We all knew he would address the conflict with the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba. I desperately wanted to be in Washington with him, but like everyone else, I would have to make do with watching on television.
My dorm didn’t have a television set, so I went over to the Student Alumnae Building, and there, on the black-and-white TV, was the President, looking more serious than I had ever seen him. The fear in the room was palpable. Some of the girls were holding hands. I stood in the back with my arms crossed. It’s hard to convey the tension in the air as the President articulated the dire situation we found ourselves in, and explained the unprecedented threat to the nation. When he reminded us that “the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing,” I looked around the room and realized that none of the other girls was thinking what I was thinking.
As I walked back to the dorm, I remember feeling not fear but urgency.
Although I had become adept at compartmentalizing my secret White House life when I was at Wheaton, this was different. I suddenly wanted to be in Washington. I wanted to be in the press office. I wanted to be in the middle of all that energy and purpose. I wanted to be part of things. This may have been the first time I thought of President Kennedy in historical rather than personal terms. In this moment, he wasn’t my lover, he was the man with the nation’s security in his hands.
That night,
I called the White House, and the switchboard operators, who knew me well by that point, put me through to Dave Powers.
He was clearly under enormous stress and didn’t have time to talk. “None of us knows what’s going to happen, Mimi,” he said curtly. “I’ll get back to you closer to the weekend.”
The next four days passed in slow motion. The Cuban Missile Crisis, as it became known, was all over the news, creating an atmosphere of deep concern in some quarters, and outright hysteria in others. We were warned about a national shortage of bomb shelters. We were besieged with apocalyptic estimates about how many people would die in a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States. I must admit that I felt a sense of dread, if not panic, myself—and my admittedly naïve response was the belief that if I could only get to Washington, all would be well. It didn’t make any rational sense, but I felt if I could be close to the President and in the building where the decisions were being made, then somehow I would feel safer, more secure.
The following Friday, Dave Powers called my dorm. I ran to the phone. “Come to Washington,” he said. “Mrs. Kennedy is going to Glen Ora. I’ll send a car.” I packed my overnight bag and signed out the next morning.
When I pulled up to the South Portico at the White House, I went directly upstairs as usual. There Dave and I played the Waiting Game in the residence living room, the one next to the President’s bedroom, while the President remained in a meeting downstairs with a group of close advisers known as EXCOMM, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. They had convened at the White House to deal specifically with the Cuban crisis. The President joined us after a while, but his mind was clearly elsewhere. His expression was grave. Normally, he would have put his presidential duties behind him, had a drink, and done his best to light up the room and put everyone at ease. But not on this night. Even his quips had a halfhearted, funereal tone. At one point, after leaving the room to take another urgent phone call, he came back shaking his head and said to me, “I’d rather my children be red than dead.” It wasn’t a political statement or an attempt at levity. These were the words of a father who adored his children and couldn’t bear them being hurt.
