These Few Precious Days

by Christopher Andersen

  Humor, Pierre Salinger said, was the Kennedys’ “secret weapon. The things they had already gone through could have made them both bitter, but they were as far from bitter as you can be. They both loved to laugh, and got a special kick out of kidding each other.”

  The first lady had a thin skin when it came to satire, however. Released that November, comedian Vaughn Meader’s send-up of the Kennedys, The First Family, sold a breathtaking 7.5 million copies, making it the biggest comedy album of all time. Jackie hated The First Family because she thought it mocked her children, but Jack loved it, cracking at a press conference that he thought Meader’s impersonation of his clipped Boston accent sounded “more like Teddy.”

  Nonetheless, Jackie took special pleasure in teasing her husband—friends knew this was about to happen when she started calling him “Bunny”—and was never more satisfied than when she could prick his often overinflated ego. “Where’s that famous Kennedy wit I keep hearing so much about?” she asked. “We certainly don’t see any of it around here.”

  In reality, the Kennedy wit was most in evidence when they were able to unwind in the company of their closest friends—the Bartletts, the Spaldings, the Radziwills, the Bradlees, Billings, Cassini, Walton, Smathers, Plimpton, and one or two others. This core group was essential because, Jackie explained, “being in the White House does make friendships difficult. Nobody feels the same. Jack’s even more isolated than I am, so I do try to have a few friends for dinner as often as possible.”

  Letting their hair down, the Kennedys felt free, for example, to discuss the eighty-six positions of the Kama Sutra with Cassini. The designer and the president also talked “quite a lot about what makes a great lover, and how romantic personalities are different from erotic personalities.”

  “Well,” JFK asked, “which am I?”

  “Oh, you’re definitely erotic,” Cassini replied. “You could be right up there with the greats in history, like Don Juan and Casanova, because you have the physical attributes, and also the charm to seduce. The only thing you lack is the time. And of course, you’re married.”

  JFK laughed. Jackie, seated just a few feet away, pretended not to hear.

  Another game Jack and Oleg liked to play involved “zoomorphizing” the people they knew. Cassini was a Siamese cat, Bobby a basset hound, Joe an owl, a lawyer they knew “a complete toad.” The president was a golden retriever or an Irish setter, and Jackie a fawn.

  Gossip was the lifeblood of these cozy evenings, and both Jack and Jackie hung on every delicious morsel of scandal brought to them from the outside world. “Jack loved to hear what was going on in New York—who was going out with whom, the real gossip,” said Spalding. One evening Spalding was perched on JFK’s bathtub, rattling off one salacious tidbit after another while the president shaved.

  Spalding was in the middle of one of his stories when, suddenly, Jack looked at him and put his index finger to his lips. “Then he reaches around the door,” Spalding said, “and who does he pull in but Jackie.”

  “We had a deal,” the president told her. “We wouldn’t open each other’s mail, we wouldn’t listen in on each other’s phone conversations, and we wouldn’t eavesdrop on each other!”

  Jackie, unchastened, simply looked them up and down. “Two excited little schoolboys jabbering away about what’s going on in New York,” she said with a sigh. “It’s pathetic.”

  “She’s jealous,” Jack told Chuck as Jackie waltzed off, “because I’m getting all the hot gossip first.”

  The first lady could be withering in her assessments of people, skewering journalists, social lions, and world leaders alike. She described Germany’s revered postwar chancellor Konrad Adenauer as un peu gaga to André Malraux, derided Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson as “Col. Cornpone and his little pork chop,” pulled down her cheeks to imitate the droopy, basset countenance of British prime minister Harold Macmillan, and offered up devastating impersonations of Eleanor Roosevelt, Pat Nixon (“with her little frizzy permanent”), Richard Nixon (“poor, poor Dick), Indira Gandhi (“a real prune—bitter, kind of pushy, just a horrible woman”), Dean Rusk (“such a timid man”), Hubert Humphrey, and J. Edgar Hoover—to name just a few. De Gaulle, whom she had once worshipped from afar, was now simply “that egomaniac.” Even minor figures she encountered while traveling were not exempt: “Did you see Khrushchev’s daughter in Vienna? She looked like some Wehrmacht blonde who ran a concentration camp!”

  Gore Vidal, for one, couldn’t have been more pleased. Jackie was, he recalled, “very malicious—but in the most enchanting, life-enhancing way. She had a very black humor. She hardly had anything good to say about anyone. Jack was very much the same way.” Unwinding with their tight circle of friends, Vidal added, “the two of them were just devastating about everyone else, and when you left the room, you knew they’d be doing it to you, too. That was one of the reasons I liked them so much.”

  Baldrige agreed that, contrary to her ladylike persona, the first lady was a “natural comic” whose impersonations of world leaders in particular were uncannily accurate. “Imagine,” Tish mused, “if any of her little performances ever got out at the time.” Like Vidal, she had no delusions of immunity. “Are you kidding?” laughed the irrepressibly good-natured Tish. “I was one of their favorite targets!”

  Their favorite targets, in fact, were each other. “She loved to needle him,” Smathers said, “and he was pretty good at it, too.” Whenever he could, Jack ribbed his wife about her friends (“those snobby bitches on Park Avenue”), her love of riding (“a sport that appeals to some awfully dull people”) and of the Virginia horse country (“I love Camp David, Jackie, because it’s not in Virginia!”), and her own social airs. (“Come off your high horse every once in a while, kid. You might like it down here with the rest of us.”)

  Jackie’s digs often dealt with her husband’s ego (“Tell the Marine band to play ‘Hail to the Chief.’ He never gets tired of that”), his vanity (“I think Liberace looks in the mirror less often than Jack does”), and the Boston pols he had known for years (“Oh, there’s Patsy ‘the China Doll’ Mulkern, who got his name because he was a boxer with a glass jaw, and ‘Onions’ Burke, and Jack’s driver ‘Muggsy’ O’Leary, and ‘Juicy’ Grenara … Gosh, Jack, are we living in a production of Guys and Dolls?”).

  Occasionally, she zeroed in on Jack’s frat-boy obsession with the opposite sex. “Jack and I would be talking about how great some gal looked in a tight dress,” Smathers remembered, “and sure enough Jackie would pop up out of nowhere.” There would be the inevitable awkward attempt to change the subject, but Jackie just laughed. “I know what you were talking about,” she’d say. “You guys will never grow up!”

  Less good-natured were the spats Jackie and Jack had over money. Each month Jackie’s secretary, Mary Gallagher, handed over the first lady’s bills to the president—and waited for him to explode. By the time the Bradlees sat down with the Kennedys for dinner in November 1962, Jackie was spending more than $120,000 a year (the equivalent of more than $1 million today)—a third of that on clothes.

  Jackie’s spending had her husband “boiling,” said Ben Bradlee, who cringed with the Kennedys’ other dinner guests while their hosts quarreled. Jack was “not so much mad, but amazed and indignant.”

  “Jackie, this has got to stop,” he told her. “You’re spending me into the poorhouse!”

  Jackie argued, rather convincingly, that a U.S. ambassador’s wife had an expense allowance paid for by the government, but the first lady had none. “At state dinners and when I travel, Jack, you want me to look good, don’t you?” countered Jackie, who pointed out that Joe was still gladly paying for her Oleg Cassini wardrobe. “I mean, I am representing our country.”

  Much to the amusement of those who knew him, the president groused constantly about money—even though had such little need for his $100,000 presidential salary that he donated the entire amount to charity. His $10 million personal fortune (roughly e
qual to $80 million today) meant he could easily afford to indulge Jackie’s extravagant tastes. But from the onset of his administration, the press had zeroed in on Jackie’s spending. “It was the Marie Antoinette thing,” Plimpton said. “Jack really didn’t know much about money because he never had to worry about it. But he did know about politics, and being perceived as having a rich wife who threw money around was going to cost him votes in the next election.”

  Of course, Jackie’s fondness for haute couture wasn’t the only problem. Perhaps to compensate for growing up as a poor relation of the Auchinclosses, Jackie also spent thousands each month on art and antiques. “If Jackie liked something,” Mary Gallagher recalled, “she ordered it and coped with the bills later.”

  In the fall of 1962 there was something brand-new for Jack to complain about. The lease on Glen Ora was up and the owners wanted to move back in—but only after the Kennedys paid to have Jackie’s pricey redecorating job undone and the place restored to its original state of shabby chic.

  Now Jackie was building her own hunt country retreat in Atoka, Virginia, on a secluded forty-acre parcel that abutted 1,400 acres owned by her wealthy friends Paul Mellon and Hubert Phipps. The actual site was called Rattlesnake Mountain, which struck Jackie as odd because, as she told Pierre Salinger, “there are no rattlesnakes and there’s no mountain.”

  Jackie sketched out the design herself on drafting paper: a modest 3,500-square-foot ranch-style house of yellow stucco and fieldstone, with seven bedrooms, five and a half bathrooms, stables, a swimming pool, a small pond—and a sweeping view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  At first, Jack was convinced that Wexford—the house was named after the Kennedy family seat in Ireland—could be brought in at or near the original $45,000 budget. By the time it was actually finished in November 1963, Wexford cost well over $100,000 to build.

  As usual, Jackie pledged to curtain her spendthrift habits, and her husband retreated. “It was a little dance they did every now and then,” Spalding said. “He’d blow up, make his point, then she’d apologize and he’d back down. If he didn’t, Jack knew Jackie would sulk and he couldn’t stand that.”

  IN THE WAKE OF THE Cuban Missile Crisis, Thanksgiving at Hyannis Port took on added meaning. “This was one of the Ambassador’s favorite holidays,” said Ham Brown, the Secret Service agent assigned to protect Papa Joe. At gatherings like this, the rest of the family—especially Jack—relied on what they believed was Brown’s ability to interpret what Joe’s “no no no’s” meant. “Hell, I had no more idea of what Joe was saying than the man in the moon,” Brown admitted. But when he had the chance, Brown usually told Jack and his brothers that the old man was looking forward to seeing them for dinner the next day. “Of course every father,” Brown explained, “wants to have his family around for dinner.”

  Back at the Executive Mansion, children’s birthday parties—Caroline’s fifth and John’s second—provided a welcome distraction the last week in November. At both events, Caroline and John blew out the candles on their birthday cakes with some help from Mom, and then tore into their presents. The Marine Band provided entertainment, and at one point John grabbed a pair of maracas and joined in. Once they finished playing with the toys, dolls, and coloring books they’d been given, everybody filed into the White House movie theater for an afternoon of cartoons.

  The post-crisis euphoria spilled over into the Christmas season. The president and first lady went through all the motions in Washington—hosting a series of White House Christmas parties, lighting the national tree, sending out thousands of Christmas cards with a photo of Jackie, Caroline, and John on a sleigh drawn by Macaroni. But the family was eager to celebrate the holidays as they always had, in the warm Florida sunshine.

  As they had the previous year, Jack and Jackie were renting the C. Michael Paul villa a mile up the road from Joe. While Jackie took the kids to see Santa Claus at Burdine’s department store (Caroline asked for a talking Chatty Cathy doll, John for a toy helicopter), their father stayed up north and tended to some end-of-the-year business.

  As he operated solo in Washington, much of what Jack was called on to do as the year wore down was ceremonial, and often fun. The day after Caroline’s birthday party, he welcomed two of his more high-profile supporters in Hollywood, Judy Garland and Danny Kaye (Garland, right at home, lit up a cigarette and posed for pictures perching on the corner of JFK’s Oval Office desk). Two days later, the president attended the Army-Navy Game at Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium, sitting on the Navy side of the field and then, at halftime and with considerable fanfare, walking across the field to sit with the Army—all by way of showing the old Navy man’s theoretical objectivity as commander in chief.

  On December 15, 1962, he sat down in the Oval Office for an unprecedented interview with correspondents for the three national networks—NBC, CBS, and ABC. Three days later, Jack and British prime minister Harold Macmillan were in the Bahamas, hashing out the merits of various nuclear weapons systems. For three days, the two allies were locked in tense negotiations. But Jack had his distractions—namely, Mimi Beardsley, ensconced by Dave Powers in her own luxurious villa at the exclusive Lyford Cay Club.

  Four days before Christmas, Jackie took Caroline and John to surprise their father when he finally arrived back in Palm Beach aboard Air Force One. Just as JFK was about to climb into the presidential limousine, they jumped out of their hiding place and ran toward him shouting “Daddy! Daddy!” Grinning broadly, he took them both in his arms and they smothered him with kisses.

  As usual, this meant lazy days spent cruising aboard the Honey Fitz, sunbathing by the pool, Christmas shopping on Worth Avenue, and lunching with friends. There was one major difference this time: Jackie declined to give any of her usual daredevil water-ski exhibitions. In fact, for reasons that later become clear, she didn’t water-ski at all.

  On Christmas Eve, they were joined by Lee and Stas (pronounced “Stash”) Radziwill and their children, who all sat on the living room floor playing with Clipper the German shepherd and Charlie the wire-haired Welsh terrier while Jack carefully hung up everyone’s stockings—nine in all—on the fireplace mantel. “It was like any family scene in any home in America on Christmas Eve,” said White House photographer Cecil Stoughton, who captured it all on film. “The President and Mrs. Kennedy were so happy to be with the kids, and Caroline and John were like kids anywhere. It is painful to think that this was their last Christmas all together.”

  The next morning, everyone tore through the wrapping on their presents with abandon. Jack, in particular, made a point of ripping open presents with unvarnished glee and he instructed the children to do likewise. “It’s half the fun,” he once told Baldrige, who had her own methodical approach to unwrapping gifts. “Jesus, Tish,” he complained as he watched her gently open gifts at an impromptu office party, “you’re not disarming a bomb.”

  What was inside those packages, in the Kennedys’ case, was usually something rare—and costly. When buying gifts for each other, Jackie and Jack took great care to come up with something unique. That Christmas, she had commissioned Milton Delano—a distant cousin of FDR—to etch a sperm whale’s nine-inch molar with the presidential seal. This became the centerpiece of Jack’s scrimshaw collection, proudly displayed in the Oval Office.

  The president devoted just as much time and energy to finding the perfect gifts for his wife: a Renoir drawing of two nudes, and a painting by post-Impressionist master Maurice Prendergast titled Summer Day in the Park. As soon as they returned to Washington, Jackie hung the Prendergast in her bedroom.

  The Cuban Missile Crisis had left Jack with one important piece of unfinished business. In return for the Soviets withdrawing their missiles, JFK had promised not to invade Cuba. As part of the grand bargain, the United States would pay a ransom of $53 million in humanitarian aid for the safe return of the 1,113 Bay of Pigs fighters imprisoned by Castro.

  Two days after Christmas, JFK invited five
newly released leaders of Brigade 2506 to the Paul mansion in Palm Beach. Jackie, in particular, was eager to have the children meet the “brave fighting men” she believed the United States had abandoned twenty months earlier.

  On December 29, 1962, the president and first lady helicoptered to Miami Beach’s Orange Bowl to join forty thousand Cuban exiles in welcoming home the freed soldiers. Jackie, who at this stage might have shied away from such a big event, had instead insisted on accompanying her husband. JFK had planned to read a carefully crafted, somewhat restrained speech, but when a Bay of Pigs veteran proudly presented him with Brigade 2506’s battle-worn flag—hidden by a prisoner during his thirty months in captivity—JFK suddenly became emotional. “I can assure you,” he told the cheering crowd, “that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana!”

  Translating her husband’s stirring words into flawless Spanish, Jackie once again had the crowd hanging on her every word. Then, speaking without notes, she added heartfelt remarks of her own. “It is an honor to stand here today,” she began in Spanish, “with some of the bravest men in the world—and to share in the joy of their families who have hoped and prayed and waited so long …” When she was done, the spectators, many of whom were openly weeping, burst into cheers and thunderous applause.

  The first couple then climbed into a white Lincoln convertible and waved to the throng as they drove out of the stadium. “You were wonderful, Jackie,” the president told her. “They loved you. Your remarks were just perfect.”

  JACKIE SCORED ANOTHER INTERNATIONAL TRIUMPH less than two weeks later, when the most famous painting in the world, the 460-year-old Mona Lisa, was unveiled at Washington’s National Gallery of Art. Thanks to Jackie’s warm relationship with both De Gaulle and French minister of culture André Malraux, the French government was allowing Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece to leave the Louvre on one condition—that it be loaned not to an American museum, but personally to the president.