Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  In the end, though Jack Kennedy came close, he fell just sixty-eight votes short of victory, losing to Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver. Jackie, feeling overwrought and emotional from the entire week, was unable to hold back her tears. “So close,” she said, absentmindedly fingering her pearl necklace, “so, so close.”

  Though he appeared gracious and humble publicly, Jack was bitterly disappointed by his loss and would express a strong private dislike for Stevenson the rest of his life. The problem was that, instead of just selecting his own running mate as had been expected, Stevenson had left the nomination to the floor in a mad race among the leading candidates: Kennedy, Estes Kefauver, Hubert Humphrey, and Albert Gore, Jr.

  Jackie stood at her husband’s side as he confidently addressed the surging crowd. Even in defeat, he looked like a winner, so handsome, charismatic, and powerful.

  Unfortunately, the baby girl Jackie was carrying would be stillborn shortly after the convention. Doctors told her that the stress of the political function may have affected the pregnancy.

  Jackie Kennedy wasn’t a political person by nature; prior to meeting Jack she had never even voted. But once she became Jack’s wife, she wanted to know more and to become more involved. She loved to travel and she took many trips abroad while in the White House, as both sightseer and presidential emissary: five weeks in India and Pakistan, a month in Italy, time in Greece and Paris. Everywhere she went, she was greeted with great enthusiasm.

  “I wasn’t very interested in politics before I married Jack,” she once noted, “but I’m learning by osmosis. People say I don’t know anything about politics, but you learn an enormous amount just being around politicians.”

  “She was intensely interested in all of the political successes of her husband’s career,” recalls Letitia Baldrige. And here lies the great failure in projecting her real image to the American public, which thought of her as a wonderful wife and mother, which she was, and a beautiful, poised woman of artistic talent, which she also was. But people also saw her as someone who hated politics and hated politicians. In actual fact, although she didn’t like events like political conventions and meetings, she was a bright, intelligent person and was interested in the issues.

  “All of the Kennedy wives were, in fact. They very definitely shared their opinions with their husbands and interrogated them as to what was going on. They were abreast and helpful,” adds Baldrige.

  While what Letitia says is no doubt true, it wasn’t always obvious. One of Jack’s speechwriters, Ted Sorenson, says, “Offhand, I don’t recall hearing about her being his political sounding board. In a meeting, or even to me in private, he never said, ‘I was discussing this with Jackie and it occurred to her that we should do this,’ or, ‘in her opinion, so and so is unreliable.’ However, their personal relationship was totally private and kept very private. She could have played such a role without anyone knowing about it.”

  “Jackie was intensely interested in foreign affairs in particular, and would often write letters to heads of states, friendly, social, chatty letters when she felt she needed to,” Baldrige continues. “Of course, we didn’t have carbon copies of what she had written and didn’t know what she was saying to these people. She would write for pages and pages to General de Gaulle and Prime Minister Nehru. She could have been setting policy for all we knew!

  “This was all the result of her working with Jack upstairs [in their private quarters] and seeing how she could help, in her way, to further America’s political gains and foreign policies. I am sure no other First Lady has ever done that, and no other President has dared let his wife have so much latitude. I hope that history will one day unearth those letters. She was intensely interested in foreign affairs.”

  Also, said Baldrige, “Jackie had a fantastic desire for historical knowledge, and she was a sponge once she learned it. She caught every nuance. And she wanted to know American history not just for herself, but for her husband. They were almost competitive in the knowledge they consumed, very much like Henry and Clare Luce in trying to one-up the other on historical facts and so forth, and I think on many points—well, he almost acquiesced that she knew more about history than he did.”

  According to Kennedy intimate Chuck Spalding, Ethel was also “terribly interested in history and politics, really passionately interested in it. With politics, she had an advantage right from the start over Jackie, because she didn’t value her privacy as much as Jackie. Jackie was bigger on writing letters, traveling, and doing her work that way, she wasn’t that interested in dignitaries coming to the White House. Ethel had a tremendous enthusiasm for governmental people and for everything they were doing, but above all for everything that her husband was doing and how it related to him. That was a tremendous asset to Bobby.

  “You never felt, from the minute you opened that front door at Hickory Hill, that you were impinging on their time, unless you were dull. Ethel hated dull people. I think it was possibly the most interesting house I have ever been in, and run in a funny kind of opulent simplicity. It was so cluttered. It was done only as Bobby and Ethel could do it, with dogs all over the place, children about, and dignitaries everywhere, all in the same proportion. Ethel was also a good speaker, when that was necessary. She was articulate.”

  Joan, on the other hand, didn’t appear to have the self-confidence necessary to be as successful in politics. She lacked conviction, both in her own views and in being able to express the views of her husband. Like Jackie, she wasn’t innately political, either. “Politics never entered her mind, or the thoughts of either of her parents,” said Eilenne Harper, who knew the Bennetts in Bronxville.

  “Her family was like many in the fifties in that, other than reading the newspaper to stay current on events, there was no interest in anything political until it was time to vote. They were Republican, as I recall. Joan once asked me, ‘Public affairs? I couldn’t care less about that kind of thing. Why would a girl care about any of that?’ It must be remembered that this was back when politics was not a dirty word, just a dull one. Few of the kids of that day were involved in what was going on in government, if only for the fact that little was going on that was of interest to most of them.” Joan’s lowest grades in college were always in political courses.

  It was difficult for Joan to muster the kind of spirit Ethel was known for when it came to politics and quasi-political events, and she definitely did not have the same stamina. Once Joan was asked to christen a ship in Massachusetts, but she had to cancel at the last minute, explaining that she was six months pregnant. Ethel, eight months pregnant herself, stepped in for her sister-in-law and made her apologies. As she stood in front of the local officials and audience, her stomach extended so far in front of her she could barely reach the microphone stand, she quipped, “My sister-in-law Joan couldn’t make it today. She’s pregnant.”

  Things would change for Joan, though, by the summer of 1962, for that was when she found herself stumping for her husband in his senatorial campaign. It was Ted’s campaign strategists’ idea to put Joan’s contagious personality and beauty to good use by having her do some politicking for him. Though she was nervous about the prospect, she seemed anxious to take her place among the ranks of Kennedy women who had participated in such campaigns. Perhaps to her it was almost a rite of passage.

  Joan had had a certain amount of preparation for such a role, the result of a brief career as a model and actress—something she never liked to discuss much. Because of her success on the beauty pageant circuit, she had considered modeling in her early twenties and had discussed the possibility with her family. Everyone seemed supportive of the idea. By the end of 1957, Joan had blossomed into a beauty. At five feet seven and a half inches, she weighed 132 pounds, with a 36-inch bust, 25-inch waist, and 37-inch hips.

  As fate would have it, Joan’s father, Harry, and a friend and former model, Candy Jones, were working together on an advertising campaign for a soap product. Jones’s husband, Harry Conover,
happened to be director of a training school for models and a beauty consultant for Colgate, one of Harry Bennett’s biggest accounts. Candy Jones mentioned to Bennett that she and her husband were looking for a model. “Have I got a girl for you,” he said. “My daughter Joan.” Candy agreed to meet Joan.

  Of that meeting, she once recalled, “Joan was one of those rare beauties we got infrequently. I found myself comparing her to an Ingrid Bergman when she was Joan’s age.”

  Soon Joan was posing for photographers in different outfits—everything from casual wear to evening gowns—for consideration by advertising agencies. Within a couple of months, she had her first modeling assignment: sixty seconds on the air in a national commercial for Maxwell House coffee, for which she was paid $2,500.

  After that, Joan worked steadily, modeling for beauty products and foods as well as making other television commercials. She became “The Revlon Girl” on The $64,000 Question and sang in commercials during The Perry Como Show (though she lost one Como commercial for Chesterfield cigarettes because she wasn’t convincing enough to the advertisers as a smoker). She joined the ensemble on Coke Time with Eddie Fisher and was scheduled to drink a Coca-Cola next to the show’s star during a live commercial; she was axed from the bit when Fisher realized she was obviously taller than he was.

  When Joan signed with the Harry Conover agency for representation, her career’s momentum picked up even more. However, it was a career that would last only about a year and a half. While she enjoyed what she was doing, Joan was really an old-fashioned girl, her values a product of her time and place. She wanted to get married to what she called “my dream husband,” have children, and live in a nice home.

  Now, with her life’s picture so completely different, Joan would use the poise and skill she had developed as a model to stump for her husband on the campaign trail. “Funny how life works, isn’t it?” she would observe to family friend Joan Braden.

  Ted’s campaign manager, the attorney Gerard Doherty, had become a close friend of the couple and was concerned that Joan might not be able to take the emotional rigors of a campaign because he knew her personality. After all, the candidate wasn’t exactly a shoo-in: At just thirty, he was at the minimum age required for the position he hoped to win and had little governmental experience. To some he appeared to be just the spoiled kid brother of the President, playing off the family name.

  Ted’s senatorial platform was a cautious approach to such liberal issues as draft reform and assistance for war refugees, as well as foolproof subjects such as the betterment of education. In time, Kennedy would become a strong politician and a respected Cold War liberal, especially after the death of Bobby. As the years passed, he would be highly regarded for important social legislation concerning the old, the poor, the unemployed and otherwise disenfranchised, as well as race relations. He has always seemed genuinely concerned about the challenges facing what Joan would call “everyday Americans.” But at the beginning, he had a long way to go to prove himself, as did Joan.

  “The other Kennedy women took to politics like ducks to water,” Doherty recalled, “and little wonder, considering their natures and heritage. But we had to remember that Joan was a duck who had never been in water like this, and here she was being dropped into a very full lake. She had to prove to everybody that Teddy wasn’t just a smart-ass kid.”

  Off Joan went in campaign worker Don Dowd’s blue Impala—followed by aides in a backup car in case of automotive trouble—all over Massachusetts, visiting hospitals to have her picture taken at the bedsides of sick children and then stopping by housing projects to be photographed with senior citizens. She would visit retired nuns in convents no one knew even existed in Massachusetts, and then attend a backyard afternoon party hosted in her honor by a complete stranger (usually a housewife contacted by campaign headquarters), during which Joan would shake hands and be photographed with about a hundred women.

  Most important to the campaign were “coffee hours,” where a campaign worker would work with an interested housewife to sponsor a one-hour get-together for about fifty women from the neighborhood. Over delicate little cakes, the women would have the opportunity to meet Joan while drinking hot coffee from paper cups emblazoned with the slogan: “Coffee with Ted.” They would ask her questions about family and community services and, if polite, could even expect Joan to answer a few nonintrusive questions about Ted and the other Kennedys.

  “Is Jackie really as nice as she seems?” was a popular query.

  Also on the list: “Is President Kennedy as good-looking in person as he is on TV?”

  “We knew these would pull in votes,” recalled Dowd, who was one of the chief coordinators of Ted’s senatorial campaign. “They were incredibly successful.”

  One of the lessons Joan quickly learned was not to ask questions of anyone in the seemingly endless receiving lines that always formed during any guest appearance. Because she was so friendly, and even nervous, Joan sometimes became overly endearing as she would inquire into the lives of the women meeting her. This kind of probing from Joan only encouraged questions to her in return, leaving less time for her to meet the others.

  After years of practice, both Jackie and Ethel had “receiving-line etiquette” down to a fine art, realizing that the line would move only as fast as they moved it. “Thank you! How lovely of you to come. So happy to see you,” they would say to any well-wisher. “ ’Bye now.” Then they would turn and look to the next person with a warm, engaging smile, thereby signaling to the last visitor that their time was up. If a person stayed in Jackie’s vision too long, she would fix him with her perfectly glazed smile and say nothing, creating a moment so awkward it would force the slowpoke on his or her way.

  One popular Kennedy family anecdote has it that Ethel became so annoyed at one lingering woman in a long receiving line, she finally snapped at her, “Ma’am, if you don’t move along right now, I’ll have to sic the police on you. And we wouldn’t want that to happen, now would we?”

  “Every vote is important,” Joan was told over and over. “Make it snappy.” (It only added to Joan’s dismay, however, when she would hear angry housewives whisper among themselves, “She didn’t even ask about me! Those Kennedys, they are so self-involved, aren’t they?”)

  By August, Ted had been nominated by the Democratic Party over the opposition of the older and much more experienced Edward McCormack, nephew of House Speaker John W. McCormack, who had served as the state’s Attorney General. Ted would end up challenging the Republican candidate, George Lodge, son of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., whom JFK had defeated for the same seat ten years earlier.

  It was a bitter battle, and Joan would be an ancillary weapon. Like all of the Kennedy women, she would do anything required of her when it came to her husband’s campaigning, even the most absurd tasks. For instance, during one tour of Dalton, a small community in western Massachusetts, Ted gifted one blind boy with a puppy. A few weeks later, the puppy became ill with a hernia and had to be taken to an animal hospital in nearby Pittsfield. When it was learned that Joan would be swinging through Pittsfield on her tour, campaign workers felt it would make for good press if she went to the hospital to visit the sick animal. So Joan’s tight schedule was rearranged and, with a motorcade leading the way and news cameras documenting the trip, she went to call on the dog.

  Visits to hospitals—for humans and for animals—residences, and churches were not difficult for Joan, though she was unnerved by the way women inevitably gawked at her. More difficult was the seemingly endless schedule of newspaper, television, and radio interviews. “I never know what to say,” she complained, “and I’m always so sure I’ll say the wrong thing. I’m afraid that I’ll be tricked.”

  Worse for Joan than any other activity, though, was when she had to give a speech. Her first as a Kennedy wife took place on the night of August 18 at the American Legion post auditorium in Springfield, after a fifteen-hour day. Because the Legion post was in an Irish community
and had been dedicated by Jack in the 1950s when he was a Massachusetts senator, it was thought that Joan would be among friends. When she walked into the auditorium, she gasped. The place was filled with over a thousand women.

  After being introduced, to thunderous applause, Joan walked onto the stage and up to the podium. She took her place as the band played “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” the theme song always used whenever Joan made an appearance, and one about which she had ambivalent feelings because it seemed somehow demeaning. Wearing a powder-blue dress and matching shoes, she began slowly, rustling papers and cue cards on her rostrum, nervously trying to remember how to begin her speech. Then she put the paperwork aside.

  “This is not what I’m good at,” she told the women, many of whom smiled up at her approvingly. Twisting her wedding band nervously, she continued, “I’m a wife and mother. I just happened to marry into the Kennedy family, and to one of the best-looking of the bunch.” The audience laughed at her little joke. “I don’t do this kind of thing because I enjoy it,” she said. “And I don’t do it for myself. I do it for Ted. And why? Because he’s the right man for the job, that’s why.”

  Joan then spoke about her husband, his ideas about government (“a better, more enriched life for the elderly of Springfield”), and, at the end of her talk, why she believed Ted would be a good senator. “It’s because he really cares,” she said, “about all people. He may be young and he may be inexperienced, but he wants to do a good job. I so hope you’ll vote for my husband, Ted Kennedy.”

  The place erupted into applause as Joan stood in the spotlight, beaming.

  Of course, while Joan was doing her part, Ted was on a similar campaign trail, giving well-thought-out speeches, using his great charm and charisma as compensation for his lack of experience. He seemed sincere; voters liked him. In fact, the final tally on voting day would be 1,162,611 votes for Ted Kennedy and 877,669 for his opponent, Lodge. Just shy of thirty-one, Edward Moore Kennedy would become the youngest senator in Washington and the only brother of a sitting president to serve in the Upper House.