These Few Precious Days

by Christopher Andersen

  This time things were different. When Fay asked if the equally stunning Kim Novak could tag along, Jack suddenly grew circumspect. “I can just see the papers tomorrow,” he said. “The new President concludes his first day speeding into the night with Kim Novak and Angie Dickinson while his wife recuperates from the birth of their first son.”

  Instead, the president went on to the next balls alone before winding up at 2 a.m. dropping in on a small party at the Georgetown home of an old friend, columnist Joe Alsop. Two hours later, when he finally arrived back at the White House, Jack was still so excited that he went straight to the Queens’ Bedroom and woke Jackie up. After sharing a few details of the evening’s festivities, she went back to sleep while he went across the hall and crawled into Abraham Lincoln’s huge, elaborately carved rosewood bed.

  Far from being angry with her husband for partying without her until dawn, Jackie felt guilty “for not participating in those first shining hours with Jack. But at least I thought I had given him our John, the son he had longed for so much.”

  It was only a few hours before Jackie joined her husband in the Lincoln Bedroom. “It’s the sunniest room,” she remembered of that first morning. “I mean, you feel like two children again. Think of yourself in Lincoln’s bed!”

  After Jack headed off for the Oval Office (“with that wonderful spring in his step,” Jackie recalled), she found herself back in bed in the Queens’ Bedroom with leg cramps so debilitating she couldn’t walk. Dr. Travell was in the process of treating Jackie’s problem (“She had my leg up in the air trying to get some kink out of it”) when “who burst in the door but Jack and President Truman. Poor President Truman just turned scarlet. I don’t think he’d ever seen a woman but his wife in bed in a nightgown before.” That night and for several nights after, Jackie and Jack ate supper on trays in the small Lincoln Sitting Room. “You know,” she later said wistfully, “I loved those days.”

  Lincoln’s rooms were, in fact, Jackie’s refuge, her “secret place.” Those times when she felt overwhelmed, and there were many, Jackie would “go and sit in the Lincoln Bedroom. It gave me great comfort. When you see that great bed, it’s like a cathedral. To touch something I knew he had touched was a real link with him. I used to sit in the Lincoln Bedroom and I could really feel his strength. I’d sort of be talking with him. Jefferson is the president with whom I have the most affinity. But Lincoln is the one I love.”

  Once the inauguration hoopla was over, Jackie really only needed a few days to regain her strength. While Jack worked in the West Wing, the first lady perched on the edge of her antique slant-front desk and had candidates for household jobs brought to see her, three at a time. They were astonished to see that the glamorous Jackie Kennedy wore riding boots, a plain white shirt, jodhpurs, and no makeup—and that she smoked.

  As it turned out, the private Jackie always wore pants if she wasn’t expecting visitors and went barefoot whenever she could get away with it. “Jackie laughed at the way people expected her to be dressed up like a cover for Vogue every minute of the day,” Tish Baldrige said. “She’d walk in a room with that wild dark mane of hers, toss off her shoes and sit cross-legged on the floor. And everyone standing there would look at each other thinking ‘Now what do we do?’”

  “I love it when they get that panicky look in their eyes,” Jackie confided to Baldrige. “Sometimes I feel like telling them, ‘No, I don’t wear a pillbox hat to bed—but I do wear one when I bathe!’”

  Even judged against her fellow first ladies, Jackie was a mind-spinning tangle of contradictions. No more qualified an authority than White House Chief Usher J. B. West believed hers was “the most complex personality” of all the modern first ladies. “In public she was elegant, aloof, dignified, and regal,” said West, who served every president from FDR to Richard Nixon. “In private, she was casual, impish, and irreverent.” Jackie also had “a will of iron,” West said, “and more determination than anyone I have ever met. Yet she was so soft-spoken, so deft and subtle, that she could impose that will upon people without their ever knowing it.”

  Mommy and Daddy were waiting at the airport to meet them when Caroline and her baby brother finally arrived from Palm Beach on February 4, 1961. Caroline sat between her parents for the ride back to her new home; in this pre-car-seat era, Jackie held John fast in her arms.

  As the limousine pulled up to the White House gates, Jackie told Caroline that this was to be her new home. “Wow,” she said, gazing out over the snow-covered grounds. “It’s very big.” At the edge of the driveway stood “Frosty,” a regulation snowman with buttons for eyes and a carrot nose—all topped off with a big white panama hat. As soon as the rear doors of the president’s car swung open, Caroline clambered out and raced toward the snowman. Jack and Jackie watched approvingly as their little girl, fresh from several weeks in the Florida sunshine, playfully poked Frosty in the stomach.

  No one was happier than the president to have his children back. Since the inauguration, he had been pestering Jackie to have them both flown up from Palm Beach with their nannies. Jackie kept reminding him that intense paint fumes made the children’s end of the family residence uninhabitable at the moment, but Jack insisted. “You’ve got to bring them back soon,” he told her. “I really miss them.”

  Jackie had other reasons for postponing the children’s arrival. “As odd as it sounds, those first few days were the first time since Jack started running for president that they could be alone,” Lowe said. “Jackie wanted to savor those moments, because I don’t think she believed they would last very long.”

  There was also no way of telling how long the Kennedys’ honeymoon with the press would last. “We were all flying pretty high,” Salinger admitted. “There was this euphoric feeling about what we were going to do for the country—I mean, we were all very young. Older hands knew the higher the expectations the greater the fall.”

  JACK’S PRESIDENCY WAS NOT YET one hundred days old when the honeymoon came to an abrupt halt. On April 17, JFK suffered not only his first major foreign policy defeat but the first significant failure of his political career when twelve hundred Cuban exiles launched an abortive invasion of Cuba. Jack authorized CIA support for the military action but at the last minute canceled promised U.S. air strikes in support of the attack. The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff condemned JFK’s decision to call off air support, which doomed the Bay of Pigs invasion from the start, as “absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal.”

  Publicly, the American president remained the very picture of strength and confidence. But privately, the Bay of Pigs fiasco left him deeply shaken. For only the second time, Jackie saw her husband weep. At 8 a.m. the morning after the attack, Jack walked into Jackie’s bedroom and, she recalled, “he started to cry. Just sobbed and put his arms around me. It was so sad. He cared so much … all those poor men who you’d sent off with all their hopes high and promises that we’d back them and there they were, shot down like dogs.”

  JFK was so despondent that the attorney general, his younger brother Bobby, paid a special visit to Jackie in the East Wing. “Please stay very close to Jack,” he asked her. “I mean, just be around all afternoon.” Jackie said Bobby wanted her “not to go anywhere, just be there to comfort him because he was so sad.”

  Even as her husband grappled with crises that would bring the world to the brink of nuclear war, Jackie set out to leave her own indelible mark on history. She vowed to transform the White House from a “soul-less office building” into a majestic showplace for the nation, to celebrate the arts, and to create an aura of high style and sophistication so extraordinary it would make the French “ashamed of Versailles.”

  Yet nothing she could do, Jackie later said, would ever be as important as the contribution she made as Jack’s wife and partner. Inside the White House, she later observed, “you were hermetically sealed … And I decided the best thing I could do was to always make it a climate of affection and comfort for hi
m when he was done for the day.” At least that way, she added, “we could sort of live our strange little life in there.”

  Jack could have had a worthwhile life without me. But mine would have been a wasteland, and I would have known it every step of the way.

  —JACKIE

  My wife is a shy, quiet girl. But when things get rough, she can handle herself pretty well.

  —JACK

  If Jack turned out to be the greatest president of the century and his children turned out badly, that would be a tragedy.

  —JACKIE

  If Mrs. Kennedy had her way, the White House would be surrounded by high brick walls. And a moat with crocodiles.

  —J. B. WEST, CHIEF WHITE HOUSE USHER

  6

  “Keeping Her Riding”

  “Admit it,” the president of the United States said as he leaned back and lit his second cigar of the day. The senator from Florida, sitting just to the right of the president’s desk in one of the nineteenth-century cane-backed chairs Jackie had handpicked for the Oval Office, was already beginning to squirm. He took a long drag on his cigarette before answering.

  “Admit what?” George Smathers asked.

  “You told me not to marry Jackie,” JFK said with a wry smile. “You said that she was too young and not sophisticated enough. I want you to admit right here in the Oval Office and right now that you were wrong. Dead wrong.”

  Until now, it was always Jackie who delighted in needling Smathers. “I remember what you told Jack,” she would whisper into his ear as they danced together in the East Room during a state dinner. “You told him I wasn’t good enough for him.” For the rest of her life, in fact, she would bring this up to Smathers every time they met, without exception.

  “Oh Jackie, for God’s sake,” Smathers would reply, “I was just testing him. I wanted to see if he really loved you!” Smathers knew Jackie “didn’t buy it, but she was nice enough to make a running joke out of it. I’m not so sure she thought it was so funny at the time.”

  Smathers definition of “sophistication” may have differed somewhat from the norm. What he meant at the time was that Jackie might not be able to tolerate her husband’s womanizing. It was Smathers, after all, who accompanied Jack on many skirt-chasing expeditions. Years earlier the two men had even tried to convince their fellow congressman Richard Nixon to cheat on his wife, Pat, during a fact-finding mission to Europe; they provided him with the names and numbers of women to contact in Paris—a note Nixon promptly crumpled up and threw away.

  Right now, however, the president wanted an answer. “Look, George,” he said, waving his hands over his desk. “Look at this magnificent desk we’re sitting at. The detail, the craftsmanship, the history. It’s only here because of Jackie, and that goes for the rest of this place.”

  The mammoth Resolute desk, carved from the timbers of the British warship HMS Resolute and given to President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria in 1878, was indeed as good a symbol as any of all that Jackie had been able to accomplish during their first year in office. This was the same desk FDR sat behind as he delivered his famous “Fireside Chats” on the radio, and Jackie discovered it languishing under a canvas sheet in the basement.

  Jack was so enamored of the desk that he asked her to have a copy made to use after he left office. Jackie also worked with Dr. Travell and the New York’s Gunlocke Company to design a special, high-backed leather-upholstered swivel chair to alleviate Jack’s back problems while he worked in the Oval Office. JFK intended to take that chair with him when he left office as well.

  The desk would become famous for reasons that had nothing to do with history or weighty matters of state. Visiting world leaders, cabinet members, or presidential advisers could be thrashing out some important issue when a curious sound might emanate from inside the desk.

  “Is there a rabbit in there?” the president would ask just as the hinged door beneath the desk popped open and John made his entrance. The toddler then ran around the room, whooping and making faces while Jack clapped his approval.

  The Resolute desk was not, as it happened, Jackie’s biggest find. That distinction went to James Monroe’s historic 1817 Bellangé pier table, which for decades had been disguised under a thick layer of gold radiator paint. There were other treasures that had been languishing in storerooms and closets: the Lincolns’ china service, busts of Columbus and Martin Van Buren, a superb portrait of Andrew Jackson, the Monroe gold and silver flatware service.

  Yet treasure-hunting of this sort—“spelunking,” she called it—was only a small part of the task. With the help of Sister Parish and the Kennedys’ old friend Bill Walton, a Time correspondent who gave up journalism for a career as an artist, Jackie set up the White House Fine Arts Committee with Winterthur Museum founder Henry Francis DuPont as its chairman. The name Du-Pont set the bar in terms of wealth and taste for the rest of the committee’s membership, which included Mrs. Paul Mellon, Mrs. Henry Ford II, Mrs. Charles Engelhard, Mrs. Albert Lasker, and Mrs. C. Douglas Dillon.

  Committee members, as it turned out, contributed far more than just their time, expertise, and the cachet of their names. Mary Lasker donated a nineteenth-century Savonnerie rug for the Blue Room, Bunny Mellon provided Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of Thomas Jefferson, and the C. Douglas Dillons shipped an entire roomful of Empire furniture to the White House along with one piece Jackie personally helped move into a place of honor in the Red Room—Dolley Madison’s sofa.

  Instead of choosing an American to head up the restoration, she gave the job to France’s most revered decorator, Stéphane Boudin. The flamboyant, seventy-two-year-old president of the Paris decorating house of Jansen had a knack for re‑creating the ceremonial grandeur of the Louis XVI and Empire periods—precisely the look Jackie was going for.

  Rather than risk a backlash for not choosing a homegrown designer, Jackie simply concealed Boudin’s involvement from the public. In the process, she also had to referee the inevitable battles between the high-strung Boudin and DuPont, an unyielding stickler for historical verisimilitude. Jackie allowed Boudin to prevail everywhere except the Green Room, which DuPont filled with spindly eighteenth-century American tables and chairs. Jackie braced herself and escorted Boudin to the Green Room for his first glimpse of DuPont’s vision. Boudin gasped. “But,” he said, “it’s full of legs.”

  Notwithstanding the magnanimous gifts and hundreds of thousands of dollars donated by the first couple’s wealthy friends, Jackie still had to figure out a way to finance the massive restoration effort. Jackie came up with idea of publishing the first White House guidebook—The White House: An Historic Guide—which not only financed the restoration but went on to sell more than 4.5 million copies, earning tens of millions of dollars for future White House projects.

  Jackie then had to convince a skeptical public that it had all been worth it. Jack, like the rest of the nation, sat glued to the set when Jackie gave the first televised tour of the White House on Valentine’s Day, 1962. Unlike Jack, a seasoned pro when it came to TV, Jackie was petrified at the thought of appearing for a full hour on prime time. “My husband,” she whispered to veteran CBS correspondent Charles Collingwood before going on the air, “is making me do this, you know.”

  The president did fulfill his promise to Jackie to make a brief appearance at the end of the show, but he really needn’t have. Drawing an astounding 46 million viewers (the taped program was broadcast on CBS and NBC on February 14, and on ABC the following day), Jackie’s White House tour ranked at the time as the most-watched prime time broadcast in the history of the medium.

  JFK “took such pride in what she accomplished,” Ted Sorensen said, “because it really was a minor miracle. When you tinker with something as cherished as the White House it really takes guts and vision and skill. All these things Jackie had in abundance.” Given Jackie’s highbrow tastes and the fact that she was a known Francophile, Jack feared a backlash. He was “surprised at what a superb diplomat she
was,” Tish Baldrige said. “It astounded him that she was able to do it, but even more so that she was to sell the idea of changing the White House so brilliantly.” Now whenever Jack spoke of his wife, Arthur Schlesinger said, “his eyes brightened.”

  George Smathers saw that look right now. “Of course I’ll admit it, Mr. President,” he said. “I wish I’d never said it, and I sure wish you’d never told her I said it!”

  In a matter of months the new first lady had also made giant strides toward her goal of creating what she called “an American Versailles,” in the process setting a new standard for entertaining at the White House. Ultimately, she and Jack would play host to seventy-four world leaders and preside over fifteen state dinners—each more dazzling than the last.

  For the first of these—a dinner for Tunisia’s diminutive President Habib Burguiba—Jackie dazzled in an off-the-shoulder Cassini gown of pale yellow silk organza. Overturning 150 years of tradition, she unilaterally replaced the long banquet tables that had always been used in the East Room with round tables, decreeing that the president and first lady sit at separate tables, and that each of the other tables be hosted by a dignitary. Jackie also hired a French chef, René Verdon, and employed the talents of noted horticulturist Bunny Mellon to advise her on floral arrangements. (Mellon also redesigned the Rose Garden and the East Garden as part of Jackie’s restoration project.)