Jackie’s Wicked Scheme
While Joan Kennedy campaigned for her husband, her sister-in-law Jackie was still away on her European vacation, of which Ravello had been a highlight. It was as if she couldn’t spend enough time away from the White House. In mid-September, she joined Jack for the America’s Cup races. Then she was off to New York for the opening of Philharmonic Hall, accompanied by John Rockefeller III. She finally returned to Washington on October 10, 1962, now more relaxed and with the Marilyn Monroe tragedy in some perspective.
“Lee told me that Jackie had finally had it out with her husband about Marilyn after they both attended the America’s Cup races,” recalls Nunziata Lisi. “He apparently told her that he had stopped seeing Marilyn before her death, and that he shouldn’t be held accountable for it. He said that she was actually in big trouble long before he started dating her. In the end, from what I understood, Jackie decided there was really no point in blaming him for what happened.”
Lee told Nunziata that, in speaking of Marilyn’s death, she and Jackie had agreed that “we’re all responsible for our own lives and for the choices we make.” However, Jackie made the observation that “it doesn’t help if one is a weak woman with a powerful man in her life influencing her to make all of the wrong choices.”
Lee said that she had to agree with that observation.
When she was in Ravello, Jackie befriended an Italian designer whose name she didn’t even remember by the time she got back to Washington. Having had a little too much to drink, she invited him to stay at the White House if he was ever in Washington. As soon as she returned, there was a message from the Italian Embassy: The designer was in town and wanted to take Jackie up on her offer.
“Oh, no!” she cried. “Why did I ever invite him? He was so dreary, I can’t bear to be in his presence again.”
“She came up with a wicked scheme,” recalls Jim Ketchum, “and got all of us who were working on the White House restoration to help. The Queen’s Room and the Lincoln Room were the principal guest rooms on the family floor. There was also a floor above with guest rooms, which she said we’d have to ignore for our present purposes. We were her partners in crime, she said. At her direction, we got tarps, paint buckets, ladders, even ashtrays with cigarette butts in them, and redecorated the rooms to make them look a complete mess, as if they were in the middle of construction.
“Then Jackie invited the designer to the White House for a visit and took him on a little tour.”
“As you can see, this is the Lincoln Room, one of the guest rooms,” Jackie told her guest. “Now, Mrs. [Rose] Kennedy sometimes naps here when she visits, even though it’s really for a gentleman. But heavens, look at it,” she added, feigning extreme disappointment. “Completely unavailable! What a shame. And look at all of those cigarette butts! I really must talk to the wallpaper hangers about that.”
Then she took her guest to the Queen’s Room. “And this is where you would have stayed, had it all worked out,” Jackie said, showing the man a room covered with dropcloths with all of the pictures off the wall and the paint buckets everywhere. “Oh, well,” she said cheerily. “Perhaps next time!”
The scheme worked, and the disappointed man went back to Italy without having stayed at the White House. But as Ketchum and his crew were preparing to straighten out the rooms and return them to their former majestic grandeur, Jackie realized she couldn’t resist one more hoax. “I want to play a trick on Jack,” she said.
She found the President, escorted him to the Lincoln Room, and said, “I just wanted you to see what we’re doing here, Jack.”
“Jackie, no!” a bewildered JFK exclaimed. “Not again. You already did the Lincoln Room. When is this going to end?”
Jackie broke into a grin, then into convulsive laughter.
“The two of them laughed themselves silly,” recalls Jim Ketchum.
The Cuban Missile Crisis
On the unseasonably warm Tuesday morning of October 16, 1962, John Kennedy received alarming news that the Russians had broken a diplomatic promise and begun setting up bases in Cuba for nucleararmed, long-range missiles that would be able to penetrate deep into America. This crisis actually had its origins at the Bay of Pigs, eighteen months earlier, when Cuban leader Fidel Castro decimated a U.S.-sponsored invasion in what was one of the worst fiascos in America’s political history and an early blight on the JFK Presidency. Now, with the Russians’ latest action, there were two options: an immediate air strike and invasion of Cuba, or a naval blockade of the island to prevent Russian ships delivering more missiles. Kennedy opted for the blockade. His decision was taken as preliminary to a declaration of war. For the next several days, citizens of the United States could do nothing but worry, pray, and wait.
With Washington, D.C., in direct range of the Cuban missiles, if they were to be launched, there would be little time to escape—it would be only a matter of a few minutes to oblivion. Perhaps Jackie and Ethel would have time enough to be rushed with their families to the special air-raid shelter that existed outside the District of Columbia. Since Ted was not a member of Jack’s cabinet, it’s difficult to say whether he and Joan would have had immediate care taken for their safety. While Jackie and Ethel met for lunch at the White House that day, top-level advisers whipped in and out of side entrances to avoid being questioned by reporters as to the unfolding of the dramatic events.
The days of the crisis were tense; at night, a greatly concerned Jackie discussed the matter with her husband. “JFK turned to his wife whenever a crisis arose,” said one of Jack’s military aides, Major-General Chester Clifton. “The Berlin Wall, the Cuban missiles, the Bay of Pigs—he would talk with her about it. She wouldn’t advise his staff, she would advise him at night.”
“She made a point of not calling me up or anybody else on the substantive side to say, why don’t you do this or make sure you don’t do that,” adds Ted Sorenson. “I don’t think she saw herself as somebody who was involved substantively on policy questions beyond the specific areas of the arts or preservation. She was not involved except for dinner table conversation or pillow talk that might involve her. And that, we’ll never know.”
Recalled Chuck Spalding, “I remember there was a little squib in the New York Times. It said that ‘at four o’clock in the afternoon, the President had called up Mrs. Kennedy and they went and walked out in the Rose Garden.’ He was sharing with her the possible horror of what might happen.”
Letitia Baldrige adds, “Jackie would leave cartoons and limericks for Jack in unexpected places to cheer him up [during the crisis]. She would arrange for a special treat—like Joe’s Stone Crabs from Miami; old friends would pay morale-boosting calls at her prompting. Her most effective weapon was a surprise visit to his office with the children. Many days she would be waiting by the elevator to help him when he emerged from it, dragging himself on crutches [because of his bad back].”
By day, as their husbands and their aides and advisers huddled over documents and aerial photographs, Jackie and Ethel busied themselves in the White House school with Jackie’s two children and three of Ethel’s. Ethel Kennedy would remember these times as “the most troubling I can ever remember” as her husband and Jackie’s, the Attorney General and the President, strategized to avoid the kind of holocaust most Americans couldn’t even begin to fathom. Dorothy Tubridy, a friend of the Kennedy family from Ireland, happened to be visiting the White House at this difficult time. “Obviously, everyone was tremendously upset and worried about the whole thing,” she said in an oral history she gave in August 1966. “Naturally, we girls, all of us, didn’t say much about anything to anyone. We stayed to ourselves and let the men handle it. I do regret now that I didn’t ask more questions. But you felt you were bothering… you know, a little person like me.”
As Jackie played with Caroline in the kindergarten, Ethel walked over to Maud Shaw and, according to what Shaw once recalled, told her she was afraid that the Kennedy children would never k
now adulthood.
“Well then, maybe we should all go to Middleburg or Hyannis Port,” Maud Shaw suggested.
“As if we’re going to be safer there?” Ethel snapped at her. She added that if the missiles were launched, “no one on this side of the country will be safe anywhere” and concluded that “seventy-five million people will be annihilated. We must be prepared for the worst.”
Poor Maud Shaw looked as if she’d been stricken. Ethel suggested that if Jackie was seen leaving the White House at such a crucial time, “people will be evacuating their homes all over this side of the country! Here,” Ethel said, “you’d better read this if you’re supposed to be taking care of Jackie’s children.”
She reached into her purse and pulled out a pamphlet from the Child Study Association of America: “Children and the Threat of Nuclear War.”
Maud Shaw began reading aloud: “American children four years old and up are aware of a danger to life and they connect this danger with the language of nuclear war, fallout, Russia, radiation, and H-bombs. Children are likely to ask questions like: Is a bomb going to hit our house? Where will Daddy go if we’re bombed? Will he get to us in time? Will I die?”
Shaw stopped reading. “Oh, dear me,” she said, flustered. “Dear, dear me.”
“ ‘Oh, dear me’ is right,” Ethel concurred as she walked away, leaving the frightened nanny with her thoughts of doom.
A few moments later, Jackie walked over to Maud Shaw and asked her what she was reading. When Shaw showed Jackie the pamphlet and told her where she got it from, Jackie snapped it from her hands.
“Just what we need around here,” Jackie said, narrowing her eyes at Shaw. “Don’t you know that panic is catching? And that children are susceptible?”
That night, after Jack’s address to the nation, only a few were asked to remain for a private meal: Ethel and Bobby, the Radziwills, Oleg Cassini, Dorothy Tubridy, artist and Kennedy family friend Bill Walton, and Mary Meyer.*
At 6:50 P.M. the Kennedy guests sat in the eighteenth-century, Louis XVI–styled Oval Room on the second floor, decorated by Jackie in the shades of yellow favored by Dolley Madison. As they sipped a 1959 pouilly-fumé (it was nearly the end of the world, and the best they could do was a three-year-old wine?), the President prepared to go on national television to address the nation from his study. Wearing a dark-blue suit, blue tie, and crisp white shirt, Kennedy looked tired but determined. The gray at his temples seemed more pronounced than usual, the lines in his face deeper. As he gave his speech, his words sent chills down the spines of millions of Americans: “Each of these missiles in short is capable of striking Washington, D.C., the Panama Canal, Cape Canaveral, Mexico City, or any other city in the southeastern part of the United States, in Cental America, or the Caribbean area.”
Calmly, the President added, “Any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere” would be regarded as an attack from the Soviet Union “requiring a full retaliatory response.” He concluded, “The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.”
After his fifteen-minute speech, Jack joined his guests for a dinner of sole Hortensia, canard à l’orange, wild rice, and épinards aux croutons. Typically, Jack was able to compartmentalize his world and enjoy a nice meal, wild rice and all, even though Armageddon seemed a distinct possibility. Oleg Cassini recalls, “The President seemed unshaken. Jackie, in colorful Pucci pants, was, as always, the perfect hostess. She tried to be cheerful and upbeat, but you could see the tension on her face. It was a difficult, difficult evening.”
At one point during the meal, McGeorge Bundy, the former Harvard dean turned adviser to the President for National Security Affairs, told Jack that he had heard the Russians might back down. Jack took a puff from his cigar, turned to Oleg Cassini, and said “Well, we still have twenty chances out of a hundred to be at war with them.”
“One wonders how Eleanor Roosevelt would handle this situation,” Jackie mused. The former First Lady, who was lying deathly ill in a New York hospital, had been on Jackie’s mind all day. Jackie couldn’t help but admire her, even though she still felt slighted over Eleanor Roosevelt’s initial refusal to support Jack’s presidential campaign. (“Well, you know, you liked Mrs. Roosevelt better than we did,” she once told Bill Walton.)
“How she got through World War II, well, I’ll never know,” Jackie said, shaking her head incredulously. “She must be such a brave lady. I pray to God to give me the strength to be half as much help to Jack as she had been to her husband.” (Eleanor Roosevelt would die on November 7, 1963; Jackie, Lady Bird Johnson, and Bess Truman would attend her funeral.)
Upon hearing Jackie’s words, Jack looked up from his meal and gazed lovingly across the table at his wife.
“If this is the end of the world, it’s God’s will,” Ethel said, ignoring Jackie’s sentiment. “There’s nothing we can do about it. We’re in God’s hands now.”
“Well then,” Jackie said, raising a glass of inexpensive Piper Heidsieck (vintage 1955!) in a toast, “God bless us all, everybody.”
“Yes, God bless us,” Mary Meyer repeated.
Everyone clinked glasses around the table, except for Ethel, who happened to be seated next to Mary, the interloper. As far as Ethel Kennedy was concerned, this woman was probably as much an adversary as Khrushchev.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was over in a matter of days—days during which America’s streets and stores were practically deserted, the air thick with apprehension and dread. In the end, it was said by Jack and his advisers that he was able to face down Khrushchev, thereby forcing the removal of the missiles. Other factors were at work as well. Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, explains, “Khrushchev had sent us two conflicting cables, and we came up with the brilliant idea of sending a cable as though we’d never received the second one. Khrushchev’s second cable contained a proposal we couldn’t accept, with the implied threat at the end of the cable, ‘Give me an answer or it’s war.’ It was Bobby who came up with the idea of sending a cable back as if we hadn’t gotten the second one. Kennedy’s cable put forth our proposal and closed, ‘Let us know within twenty-four hours.’ That gave Khrushchev an out with his people.” Also a deal was made, of which the public was unaware, whereby the United States traded its armed missiles positioned in Turkey for Russia’s missiles headed for Cuba. This agreement was struck with an understanding between the United States and Russia that they would not make it public.*
By the end of the week, as the ordeal drew to a close, Jackie decided to spend the weekend at Glen Ora. She played with the children, rode, and hunted, happy and secure in the knowledge that Jack and Bobby had made the right moves and decisions and that Jack had also probably gained the respect and support of even his most vocal dissenters. On the Sunday after the crisis passed, Jack attended morning Mass at St. Stephens Catholic Church in Washington before joining Jackie in Virginia. Ethel and Bobby went back to their chaotic life at Hickory Hill.
Jackie considered the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to be Jack’s greatest achievement. “There was nothing that caused greater concern in 1961 and 1962 than that there was no control over nuclear weapons,” she said. “So many countries would have atomic weapons and be testing them, and the world would be that much closer to total destruction. The Test Ban Treaty was finally signed. It was more a sense of enormous relief, and our future generations, and our children and theirs, would be safe.”
“She was immensely interested in the limited Test Ban Treaty and thought it an immense achievement,” recalled Robert McNamara. “I had been very involved in pushing for it, so [the President] gave me one of the pens he used to sign it. Subsequently, because she spoke of it with such pride, I gave her the pen.”
After the Cuban Missile Crisis passed, life went on for the Kennedys as it did for the rest of the country. “But there would always be that nagging in the back of our minds that such a thing could happen again, though we didn’t
know how or when. It was just a sense of unpredictability about life in general,” said Joan, who waited out the ordeal at her and Ted’s home with their children. “I don’t think we ever forgot it, or took life for granted again, it was that close.” (True to their distinct personalities, Jackie took a more optimistic view about the future than Joan. In a letter to a friend, she wrote: “Perhaps saving old buildings and having new ones be right isn’t the most important thing in the world—if you are waiting for the bomb. But I think we are always going to be waiting for the bomb. And it won’t ever come.”)
At this time, Jackie’s concerns ranged from the nationally urgent, such as nuclear war; to the personally relevant, such as Jack’s ongoing affairs; to the ridiculous—such as what to do with a herd of cows.
At the end of the year, the Kennedys’ lease at Glen Ora was to expire. Because the owner was unhappy about the way Jackie had modified the home to suit herself—she had even made structural changes!—the lease would not be renewed. So Jackie was faced with the dilemma of what to do with a gift Lyndon Johnson had given her for the children: two cows that, over a period of two years, had become legion in number.
Jackie wrote to the vice president in October 1962, saying that she didn’t know what she would now do for a retreat, but “I can see myself plodding down a dusty lane, beating the rumps of a lowing herd in front of me, which is what your cows have now grown into.” (Actually, the Kennedys decided to build their own retreat elsewhere in Virginia.) Jackie wrote that she felt bad that she and Jack could no longer care for the cows, but because there were so many due to the “great fertility of LBJ cattle,” they would have to either give them to the Johnsons or sell them. She suggested that with the profit she would purchase a present in the Johnson’s name for the White House. Jackie noted that the “sad thing about having cows is the little calves you love the most always end up at the butcher! One thing I won’t do is eat any of them!” She closed by joking, “Now I know how Nehru feels about population control!” (Johnson decided to buy back the cows himself, and he gave the money back to Jackie so that she could purchase a gift in his name. Problem solved. Jackie wrote back that the gesture “almost made me weep.”)
Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot Page 21
