PERSONAL PAPERS, ARCHIVES, AND MANUSCRIPTS
Archival materials and manuscripts from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library relating to the following individuals were used either as source material for this book or for background purposes:
Kirk LeMoyne (Lem) Billings (includes letters from JFK); Clark Clifford, Kennedy family attorney, 1957–61 (includes insightful memos); Barbara J. Coleman, journalist and White House press aide and aide in Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign (papers include miscellaneous correspondence between Jackie Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver); Katherine Evans (including condolence letters and correspondence to Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy, drafts and copies of acknowledgments); Paul B. Fay Jr., personal friend of JFK’s and undersecretary of the Navy (includes personal correspondence between Fay and JFK, as well as original manuscript and notes relating to his book The Pleasure of His Company); Dun Gifford (including correspondence and campaign materials concerning Joan Kennedy’s involvement in Ted Kennedy’s senatorial campaigns); Roswell Gilpatrick, deputy secretary of defense, and friend of Jackie Kennedy’s; Edward (Ted) Moore Kennedy (Senate files); John Fitzgerald Kennedy Personal Papers; John Fitzgerald Kennedy President’s Office Files (the working files of JFK as maintained by his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln; includes correspondence, secretary’s files, and special events files through the years of the administration); John Fitzgerald Kennedy White House Social Files (includes papers and records of Jackie Kennedy’s and the White House Social Office under the direction of Letitia Baldrige and Pamela Turnure); Robert Francis Kennedy (the author’s researcher utilized only the Attorney General Papers 1967–68); Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (correspondence, family papers, research, background materials, and drafts of her memoir, Times to Remember); Evelyn Lincoln, personal secretary to JFK (includes research materials, notes, and other papers pertaining to her book My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy); Frank Mankiewicz; Kenneth O’Donnell, special assistant to JFK (includes correspondence, audiotapes, news clippings, pamphlets, and memorabilia, as well as notes and drafts of “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,” written with Joe McCarthy); Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (includes condolence letters, tributes, Mass cards relating to JFK’s death; not particularly enlightening but interesting just the same); David Powers (includes copious correspondence, audiotapes, news clippings, and memorabilia); Pierre Salinger, press secretary to JFK (includes correspondence, press briefings, and, most important to my research, press releases and telephone memoranda); Arthur Schlesinger Jr., special assistant to the president (includes correspondence, drafts, and copious research materials, book drafts, and manuscripts for his wonderful books A Thousand Days and Robert Kennedy and His Times, a treasure trove for any Kennedy historian); Theodore Sorensen, special counsel to the president (includes manuscripts and personal papers, as well as magazine and newspaper articles); Theodore White, journalist and author of The Making of the President and other works; the mother lode for any Kennedy historian, including all of White’s outlines, notes, drafts, proofs with annotations, correspondence, notes, and transcripts from his interview with Jacqueline Kennedy after JFK’s assassination); United States Secret Service Papers and Files (includes all records of Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s activities from 1968 to 1971).
Also utilized: Charles Higham Collection of Papers (Occidental College, Eagle Rock, California); Joseph Kennedy Correspondence (House of Lords Library, London); Peter Lawford Files (Special Collection Division, Hayden Library, Arizona State University, Tempe); Jacqueline Onassis Oral Histories (Lyndon Baines Johnson Library); Secret Service Gate Logs (JFK Library, visits filed chronologically); Sidney Skolsky Papers (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences); Donald Spoto Papers (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences); Gloria Swanson Papers (Hoblitzelle Theatre Arts Library, University of Texas, Austin); White House Central Subject Files (JFK Library); White House Files of Chester Clifton Jr. (JFK Library); White House Press Releases (JFK Library); White House Telephone Logs (JFK Library, calls filed chronologically); Zolotow Collection (Humanities Research Center, University of Texas).
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
The Arts & Entertainment Network’s Biography series was invaluable to my research for After Camelot, providing me with tapes, transcripts, and other materials.
The following documentaries were reviewed as part of my research: “Chappaquiddick”; “Conspiracies”; “Joseph Kennedy, Sr.: Father of an American Dynasty”; “John F. Kennedy: A Personal Story”; “Ted Kennedy: Tragedy, Scandal and Redemption”; “Magic Moments, Tragic Times: Camelot and Chappaquiddick”; “The Men Who Killed Kennedy”; “Jackie O: In a Class of Her Own” (from which some quotes by John Davis and Pierre Salinger were culled); “Christina Onassis”; “Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis”; “RFK Assassination/’68 Democratic Convention”; “Helen Thomas: The First Lady of the Press”; “Lady Bird Johnson: The Texas Wildflower”; “Lyndon Johnson: Triumph and Tragedy”; “Presidents in Crisis: Johnson Quits and Nixon Resigns”; “Secret Service.”
SOURCES AND OTHER NOTES
It is impossible to write accurately about anyone’s life without many reliable witnesses to provide a range of different viewpoints. A biography of this kind stands or falls on the cooperation and frankness of those involved in the story. A great number of people went out of their way to assist me over the years. More than five hundred friends, relatives, politicians, journalists, socialites, lawyers, celebrities, Kennedy business executives and former executives, Kennedy family political associates, as well as foes, classmates, teachers, neighbors, friends, newspeople, and archivists were contacted in preparation for this book.
I think it should be obvious to most people that in the research and writing of a book such as After Camelot, I and my team carefully reviewed, as secondary sources, the many hundreds of books that have been published over the last fifty years about assorted Kennedy family members, as well as thousands of newspaper and magazine articles written about them. I’m not going to list all of them here, though I will list quite a few. In many cases, though, I will set forth in the following source notes specific books or articles that I relied on and that I believe deserve special acknowledgment.
Also, in writing about a family as beloved and as controversial as the Kennedys, a historian such as myself will encounter many sources who would like to speak, but not for attribution. As I have often stated over the years, it’s a personal choice as to whether or not someone wants to be acknowledged as a source for one of my books. After all, it can put a person in a very difficult position with the subject(s) of the book. I have learned over the years that sometimes anonymity is important. Though I would prefer, of course, for all of my sources to be acknowledged by name, it’s just not a reasonable or practical expectation. Therefore, whenever a source of mine or of one of my researchers asks for anonymity, I always grant the request. I appreciate and value all of the people from so many walks of life who spoke to me and to my team of researchers for After Camelot, whether specifically named in these notes or not.
The following notes and source acknowledgments are by no means comprehensive. Rather, they are intended to give you, the reader, a general overview of my research.
PART ONE. JACKIE
I referred to my interviews with Oleg Cassini, Roswell Gilpatric, Barbara Gibson, Leah Mason, Larry Newman, Sancy Newman, Pierre Salinger, Jacques Lowe, Leo Damore, Liz Carpenter, Helen Thomas, John Davis, Hugh Sidey, Jim Whiting, James Bacon, Nancy Bacon, Marvin Richardson, Morton Downey Jr., Barbara Gibson, David Powers (questionnaire), George Smathers, Letitia Baldrige, Raymond Strait, Jack Valenti, Walter Cronkite, and Stanley Tretick.
The conversation between Ted Kennedy and Senator George Smathers was recreated based on Senator Smathers’s memory of it during our interviews in the spring and summer of 1998.
Cathy Griffin interviewed Joe Gargan on March 17, 1999. We also drew from a Q&A submitted and returned from Mr. Gargan that same month.
For this section as well as many others
in this book, I drew heavily from my interviews with Joan Braden, originally conducted for Jackie, Ethel, Joan in 1998. I also referred to Joan Braden’s oral history found in the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library as well as many stories for women’s magazines about the Kennedys written by Ms. Braden, such as “Joan Kennedy Tells Her Own Story,” for McCall’s, August 1978.
I relied heavily on my interviews with Arturo D’Angelo (May 1, 2009, and June 2, 2010), the attorney representing Creon Broun, Onassis’s American money manager. I did speak to Broun, as mentioned in the text, but he wasn’t particularly helpful.
Nikos Mastorakis’s recollection of the night Onassis welcomed Jackie and Teddy aboard the Christina was drawn from an interview with him first published in Photoplay, June 1969.
Articles referred to: “The Kennedy Women” by Peter Maas, Look, October 11, 1960; “Jacqueline Kennedy,” by Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer, Ladies’ Home Journal, April 1961; “Jacqueline—What You Don’t Know About Our First Lady,” by Laura Bergquist, Look, July 4, 1961; “Valiant Is the Word for Jackie,” by Laura Bergquist, Look, January 28, 1964; “The Courtship of Jack and Jackie,” by Jim Hoffman, Photoplay, March 1964; “How He Really Was,” by Jacqueline Kennedy, Life, May 29, 1964; “I Should Have Known…,” by Jacqueline Kennedy, Look, November 17, 1964; “Jackie Kennedy—What the Past Two Years Have Taught Me,” by Melisande Meade, Lady’s Circle, December 1965; “How Jackie Told John-John and Caroline…,” by Debbie Sherwood, Motion Picture, September 1968; “From Camelot to Elysium” (no author attribution), Time, October 25, 1968; “The Old Life for a New Jackie,” by Isabel West, Lady’s Circle, May 1969; “Ethel Relives Wedding Day,” Photoplay, August 1969; “Assassination Diary,” by Michael Beschloss, Newsweek, November 13, 1998; “Their History Is Our History,” by Michael Beschloss, Newsweek, July 1999; “Jackie Style,” by Jenny Rubinfeld, Us Weekly, April 30, 2001; “Jackie’s Style,” by Michelle Tauber, People, May 7, 2001; “FBI Probing ‘Stolen’ Jackie Note,” Associated Press, September 13, 2006; “A Gift from Long Ago,” by Bob Herbert, New York Times, November 22, 2010.
I also relied on Look’s 1964 One-Year Anniversary of the JFK Assassination.
Volumes referred to: The Kennedys in Hollywood, by Lawrence J. Quirck; The Kennedy Neurosis, by Nancy Cager Clinch; The Kennedy White House, by Carl Sferrazza Anthony; President Kennedy, by Richard Reeves; A Hero for Our Times, by Ralph G. Martin; Joseph P. Kennedy: A Life and Times, by David Koskoff; Seeds of Destruction, by Ralph G. Martin; Hostage to Fortune, by Amanda Smith; The Bouviers, by John H. Davis; The Death of a President, by William Manchester; The Shadow President, by Burton Hersh; The Dark Side of Camelot, by Seymour Hersh; The Dark Side of Camelot, by Nelson Thompson; The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings, by Thomas Maier; The Kennedy Detail, by Gerald Blaine; Kathleen Kennedy, by Lynn McTaggart; First Ladies, vol. 2, by Carl Sferrazza Anthony; John F. Kennedy, President, by Hugh Sidey; A Very Personal Presidency, by Hugh Sidey; With Kennedy, by Pierre Salinger; The Coming of the New Deal, by Arthur M. Schlesinger; A Tribute to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (privately printed, by Doubleday, 1995); In My Own Fashion, by Oleg Cassini; A Thousand Days of Magic, by Oleg Cassini; Kennedy and the Press, by Allen H. Lerman and Harold W. Chase; Counsel to the President, by Clifford Clark; Of Diamonds and Diplomats, by Letitia Baldrige; The Making of the President 1960, by Theodore White; Sargent Shriver: A Candid Portrait, by Robert A. Leston; Kennedy Justice, by Victor Navasky; Those Fabulous Kennedy Women, by H. A. William Carr; The Kennedy Family, by Joseph Dinneen; The Cape Cod Years of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, by Leo Damore; JFK: Reckless Youth, by Nigel Hamilton; The Founding Father, by Richard J. Whalen; The Power Lovers, by Myra MacPherson; A Hero for Our Time, by Ralph G. Martin; Ethel, by Lester David; Bobby, by Lester David; The Consent of the Governed, by Arthur Krock; Six Presidents, Too Many Wars, by Bill Lawrence; Atget’s Gardens, by William Howard Adams; Life with Rose Kennedy, by Barbara Gibson and Caroline Latham; Rose, by Gail Cameron; My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy, by Evelyn Lincoln; An Honorable Profession, edited by Pierre Salinger, Frank Mankiewicz, Edwin Guthman, and John Seigenthaler; “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,” by Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David E. Powers; One Special Summer, by Lee Bouvier Radziwill and Jacqueline Bouvier Onassis; I Was Jacqueline Kennedy’s Dressmaker, by Mini Rhea.
I also relied on my interviews with Mona Latham (May 4, 2009, April 3, 2010, and January 11, 2011), a close friend and business associate of Jackie’s business manager, André Benoit Meyer.
I referred to my interview with Olga Price, Jackie’s former housekeeper (September 3, 2010).
Of additional interest: A 1963 letter from Jackie Kennedy to Jack Kennedy just a month before he was assassinated is telling in that it illustrates her strong emotion for him. It was written from Greece, where she was vacationing with Aristotle Onassis and other friends after the death of her infant son, Patrick. “I miss you very much,” she wrote. “I think how lucky I am to miss you. I know I exaggerate everything, but I feel sorry for everyone else who is married. I realize here so much that [I] am having something you can never have—the absence of tension. I wish so much I could give you that, but I can’t. So I give you every day while I think of you. [It is] the only thing I have to give and I hope it matters to you.”
A 1965 letter to President Lyndon Johnson demonstrated just how traumatized Jackie was not only by what happened in Dallas but even afterward when, her dress stained with JFK’s blood, she witnessed the swearing in of President Johnson on Air Force One. In May 1965, the British memorial to President Kennedy was to be dedicated by Jackie and Queen Elizabeth II. LBJ felt it would be appropriate for Jackie to travel in a presidential 707. “I thought for two days before writing to you,” Jackie said in her March 28 letter to Johnson, “because I did not know if I could steel myself to go in one of those planes again.” However, she wrote that she ultimately decided it would be a tribute to President Kennedy if she were to arrive in England that way. “But please do not let it be Air Force One,” she wrote, “and please let it be the 707 that looks the least like Air Force One inside.”
The note from Jackie to Ethel (“My Ethel, I stayed up…”) was put up for auction by Heritage Auction Galleries in 2006. It has since been returned to the Kennedy family.
PART TWO. EUNICE
I referred to my interviews with Helen Thomas, Hugh Sidey, and Sancy Newman.
The conversation the Kennedy women had about Phil Donahue was re-created from the recollection of Joan Braden, as were details of the women’s tour of Timberlawn.
Maria Shriver’s comments are from the eulogy she gave at her mother’s funeral in August 2009. I also drew from informal conversations I had with Maria in April 1994 for this and other sections of the book.
I referred to “A Life of Challenge,” by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, Inside Borders, June 1998, and some of the quotes found in other sections of this book are from this article.
I also referred to a tape of CBS News’s 60 Minutes program broadcast on October 19, 1997. Appearing on that show were Robert Kennedy Jr., Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, Christopher Kennedy, and Maxwell Kennedy. (During the broadcast, Robert Kennedy Jr. said he warned his children about the dangers of alcohol, particularly for Kennedys. “I talk to them about my own experience and they’re all aware of that,” he said in the interview at Hickory Hill, the Kennedy estate in McLean, Virginia. “I tell them that it’s in their genes. I feel in many ways that I was born an alcoholic.”)
I also consulted an interview with Joseph P. Kennedy in Time, July 1960, and an editorial written by Eunice Kennedy Shriver for the Saturday Evening Post in September 1962. Some of Bobby Shriver’s, Timothy Shriver’s, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend’s comments here and in other parts of this book are from “The New Kennedys,” by Karen Tumulty, Time, November 13, 2001.
Volumes consulted: In the Kennedy Style, by Letitia Baldrige; Brothers, by David Talbot; A Question of Character, by Thomas C. Reeves; Journals, 1952–2000, by Ar
thur M. Schlesinger Jr.; Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years, by Carl Beauchamp; Sins of the Father, by Ronald Kessler; Special Olympics, by Books LLC; To Jack with Love: Black Jack Bouvier, a Remembrance, by Kathleen Bouvier; The Bouviers, by John Davis; The Auchincloss Family, by Joanna Russell Auchincloss and Caroline Auchincloss; Our Forebears, by John Vernon Bouvier Jr. (privately printed); The Kennedy Legacy, by Theodore Sorensen; With Kennedy, by Pierre Salinger; Upstairs at the White House, by J. B. West; Diamonds and Diplomats, by Letitia Baldrige; Power at Play, by Betty Beale; Ethel Kennedy and Life at Hickory Hill, by Leah Mason (unpublished manuscript); The Other Mrs. Kennedy, by Jess Oppenheimer; Ethel, by David Lester; The Kennedy Women, by Laurence Learner; Jack and Jackie, by Christopher Andersen; All Too Human, by Edward Klein; The Sins of the Father, by Ronald Kessler; Seeds of Destruction, by Ralph C. Martin; First Ladies, by Carl Sferrazza Anthony; Jacqueline Kennedy, by Gordon Langley Hall; The Kennedy White House Parties, by Ann H. Lincoln; Jacqueline Kennedy: La Première Dame des Etats-Unis, by Peter Peterson; Jackie: The Exploitation of a First Lady, by Irving Shulman; Jackie Oh!, by Kitty Kelley; The Pleasure of His Company, by Paul B. Fay Jr.; The Bouviers, by John Davis; Kim Novak: Reluctant Goddess, by Peter Harry Brown; Jacqueline Kennedy: Beauty in the White House, by William Carrl; Jackie: The Price of the Pedestal, by Lee Guthrie; The President’s Partner, by Myra Gutin; The Kennedy Promise, by Henry Fairlie.
After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present Page 64
