Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  So by the time LBJ telephoned Jackie two days before Christmas, she knew what he wanted: for her to visit the White House. What she didn’t know was that he was trying to prove to four reporters that he and Jackie were “like this.”

  An hour after LBJ’s Christmas call to Jackie, her secretary Nancy Tuckerman received a telephone call from a fact checker at the Associated Press. It seemed that AP reporter Francis Lewin, one of the reporters present in the Cabinet Room during the call, intended to file a story about it. Would Jackie like to comment?

  “You must be joking,” Jackie exclaimed when Tuckerman told her about the story. “But how did they even know that the President called me?” When she was told that there were reporters listening on the speakerphone during the conversation, she was angry. “I think that’s going just a bit far,” Jackie told Nancy Tuckerman. “I don’t like it at all. I think you should talk to Pierre [Salinger] about this. Tell him I’m very angry.”

  Before Tuckerman had an opportunity to call Salinger, Bobby had already done so. “Look, he’s using Jackie,” Bobby said. “Tell him we know it, and we want him to fucking stop it.”

  Salinger telephoned the President and, during another conversation recorded by Johnson, carefully asked if there had been newspaperwomen present during the time Johnson made his Christmas call to Jackie. Sounding defensive, LBJ confessed that there had been, and added he had cautioned the reporters to report only that he had talked to the former First Lady, and nothing more about their conversation, “because I didn’t want a private conversation to be recorded.” (Mean-while, Johnson had not only recorded Jackie, but was also surreptitiously recording his conversation with Salinger.)

  “I see nothing wrong with the President calling Miz Kennedy and the children and wishing them a Merry Christmas,” Johnson told Salinger, his tone testy. “I want to be as nice and affectionate and considerate and thoughtful of Miz Kennedy as I can during these days. I just think that’s good politics.”

  The Kennedy Camp on LBJ: “A Blight on the New Frontier”

  In early January 1964, Ethel Kennedy telephoned Jackie to ask if she would have lunch with her and Bobby at Hickory Hill. She explained that she had something important to discuss with the former First Lady.

  With three Secret Service agents in tow (including the trusted Clint Hill) as well as Maud Shaw, John Jr., and Caroline, Jackie arrived at Bobby and Ethel’s home just after noon. She wore a simple, black pantsuit, a white blouse, an elegant strand of pearls, and a black scarf tied at the chin. She also wore large sunglasses, foreshadowing the mysterious “Jackie look” of the 1970s.

  Ethel, Bobby, and Jackie—still wearing the scarf but having taken off the glasses—sat at the kitchen table. Over a meal of stuffed egg-plant, which Jackie didn’t touch, Ethel got right to the point. “This thing with Johnson is out of hand,” she said. “Do you realize that every time he talks to you, he goes to the press. He’s using you, Jackie. You know that, don’t you?”

  Ethel turned to Bobby for support. He nodded absentmindedly.

  “Oh, of course I know that,” Jackie said. “I’m not stupid, Ethel.” Jackie went on to say that, in her opinion, Johnson was “a sweet man.” She felt that what the two had gone through in Dallas had cemented a relationship between them.

  Ethel strongly disliked the Johnsons, as did many in the Kennedy circle. She couldn’t relate to their folksy ways, thought of them as argumentative, and believed that they looked down upon the Kennedys. She had customarily deleted Lyndon and Lady Bird from the guest lists of her extravagant parties at Hickory Hill under the Kennedy administration, and when she was forced to invite them as a matter of protocol, she usually ignored them once they arrived. “Look at her standing over there glarin’ at us like we’re dentists,” LBJ once said of Ethel at a Hill party he and Lady Bird managed to attend.

  Most people in the Kennedy camp felt that LBJ was a blight on the New Frontier. He just didn’t fit. Kennedy had offered him the Vice Presidency only to keep him safely tucked away. JFK realized early on that if he won the election, it would probably be by a small margin and, as he put it to Kenny O’Donnell, “I won’t be able to live with Lyndon Johnson as the leader of a small Senate majority.” So with Lyndon out of the way as Vice President, Kennedy would have Mike Mansfield as the Senate leader, someone upon whom he could depend.

  For all intents and purposes, Bobby had taken over the position as Jack’s right-hand man, and Johnson was either ignored or placated by most of Kennedy’s administration. LBJ had it right when he once said that the Kennedys thought of him as “a good ol’ country boy with tobacco juice on my shirt.” When friends gave Ethel and Bobby an LBJ voodoo doll a month before the Dallas tragedy, “the merriment was overwhelming,” recalls Time magazine’s Hugh Sidey, a frequent visitor at Hickory Hill. But were it not for LBJ, Kennedy probably would not have won the election. With Johnson on the ticket, Kennedy took not only Texas but also the important Southern states of Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, and South Carolina.

  Jackie had always felt a strong empathy for Lyndon Johnson. Jack had been killed in Johnson’s beloved Texas, and Lee Harvey Oswald was killed there, as well. “He thinks Americans will never accept him as President,” she said, “and if he wants to use me in that regard, well, can you blame him?” Though Jackie realized that Jack didn’t have much of a relationship with Lyndon Johnson and, in fact, practically never relied on him for anything, she liked Johnson anyway.*

  When Ethel called him “a worthless President,” Jackie disagreed, citing his eagerness to see Jack’s civil rights programs passed (which were actually LBJ’s first civil rights programs as Senate Majority Leader).

  Jackie turned to Bobby for rescue, but he just stared straight ahead. He was in a dour mood with a pinched look around his mouth, perhaps still depressed over Jack’s death. He probably looked smaller and more frail than Jackie had ever seen him, for this is what others who knew Bobby have said about him after his brother’s murder.

  “Oh, you would so like Lady Bird if only you’d give her a chance,” Jackie said—and she was right about that: Lady Bird Johnson was much more Ethel’s kind of woman than was Jackie. Whereas Jackie was the epitome of the modern jet-set age, her life brimming with action and excitement, Lady Bird’s idea of fun was a trip to wide open spaces where she could don Levi’s and tennis shoes and tramp around the countryside to her heart’s delight. Just like Ethel. But Ethel wasn’t interested in developing a kinship with Lady Bird.

  “They really don’t like us at all, you know,” Ethel said as she continued railing against the Johnsons, even bringing up the old story about the time LBJ took Bobby deer-hunting, hoping to make a fool of him because he realized that Bobby would never be able to handle a rifle. “I think we should be careful about how they exploit us for their own gain.”

  “Well, I couldn’t care less about any of this,” Jackie said finally, hoping to end the discussion. After a few moments of silence, Jackie dug into her purse for a cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag, making its tip turn red. She exhaled with a loud sigh. Then, with a sad smile, she shook her head and said, “What an awful world this is, isn’t it? An awful, awful world when you can’t even accept another person’s kindness without endless debate about the motivation behind it. It’s all so dreary.”

  Ethel shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, “So, what else is new?”

  Bobby, who detested LBJ and had never tried to hide his feelings in the past, stared straight ahead as if he had not heard a word the two women had said.

  Jackie had already set her boundaries with Johnson, anyway. She knew he would be able to use her only so much, because she wouldn’t allow him to push it. “I will tell you one thing,” she said at the time. “They will never drag me out as a little old widow like they did Mrs. Wilson when President Wilson died. I will never be used that way. I don’t want to go out on a Kennedy driveway to a Kennedy airport to visit a Kennedy school. I’m not going around accepting plaques. I don’t w
ant medals for Jack.”

  It would take some time for Johnson to understand that Jackie had set limitations. Two days after her luncheon with Ethel and Bobby, Jackie was at her home in Georgetown, trying to sleep. It was 11:30 P.M. when she was jolted by the sound of the ringing telephone. Again it was the President of the United States, the biggest pest in her life these days, wanting to know when she would come by and visit him. He said he would finally be able to relax and start taking naps during the afternoon “on the day you come down here and see me.” To Jackie, his constant pestering had become exhausting.

  “Oh, Mr. President,” Jackie said, wearily. “I can’t come down there. I was going to tell you. I’ve really gotten hold of myself. You know I’ll do anything for you,” she said. “I’ll talk to you on the phone. I’m just scared I’ll start to cry again.”

  “Oh, you never cried,” LBJ said.

  He must have quickly realized the callousness of his statement. At the church during the service for Jack, Jackie had cried uncontrollably, and anyone near her—as he was—knew it. Clint Hill handed her a handkerchief and tried to comfort her, but to no avail. The wracking sobs and uncontrollable spasms would not stop. Caroline, at her side, had reached out, grabbed her mother’s hand, and held it tightly. Jackie had managed to compose herself before going for Communion, but it had not been easy.

  LBJ nervously corrected his statement. “Honey, I never saw anyone as brave as you.”

  “But, I mean…” Jackie seemed at a loss for words. “It’s… you know…”

  “… or as great,” LBJ continued.

  “I just can’t,” Jackie insisted.

  “You know how great we think you are?” LBJ said, pushing.

  “Well, you know,” Jackie said, sounding as if she was at the end of her rope. “I’ll talk to you. I’ll do anything I can for you. But don’t make me come down there yet.”

  “Well, I got to see you before long,” Johnson said.

  “Anytime you say, Mr. President,” Jackie responded, her tone one of resignation, as if she understood that it didn’t matter what she said, he wasn’t listening.

  Then, they signed off. It was the last time LBJ ever asked Jackie to visit the White House.*

  Joan’s Bottled-Up Anxiety

  Ethel Kennedy had predicted that the home originally chosen by Joan when she and her family moved to Washington would prove to be too small. Perhaps she felt vindicated when she learned that after less than a year, in January 1964, Joan and Ted decided they needed more space, and moved into another home in Georgetown. The redbrick, vine-covered home with white-trimmed windows, selected by Joan, was a real find, boasting a large drawing room, library, and dining room. This five-bedroom, five-bathroom home was truly a palace, possibly fit more for a queen than for a senator’s wife. The house was such a large, formidable structure that taxicab drivers often mistook it for a hospital. Because it was a completely uncharacteristic environment for the rather simple tastes of Joan, some in the Kennedys’ circle began to wonder about the reasons behind the purchase.

  “We knew there was a problem afoot when she moved into that house,” said one of Joan’s friends, today the wife of a senator but at the time married to a newspaper reporter. “She was overcompensating for something that was missing in her life, or at least that’s how most people saw it. We knew that her drinking was getting worse. You couldn’t keep that kind of thing a secret in Washington. Whenever Joan would go to lunch and have one too many cocktails, people talked.”

  Whether or not Joan was “compensating” for some lack in her life, she was now truly living the full Kennedy experience: She had a governess for the children, a cook for the family, and a social secretary (Theresa Dubbs, an attractive blonde who had worked for the Kennedy presidential campaign in 1960) to tend to her own needs. She had money at her disposal and, even though she was usually frugal, she was living a life that was not exactly the norm for most women in America.

  Joan’s days were increasingly busy with social activities, charity work, and luncheons with the wives of other senators. For instance, Joan and Marvella Bayh, wife of Indiana Senator Birch Bayh, both became members of “the Senate Ladies,” an informal organization formed in the early 1900s to aid the Red Cross during the First World War. The Vice President’s wife was always the leader of the group, which met on Tuesdays. The women spent hours after lunch sewing and rolling bandages, which were then sent on to Bethesda Naval Hospital.

  As long as Joan was consumed with and preoccupied by her duties as a senator’s wife, she seemed in good spirits. Many of her days and nights were busy, which was the way she liked it; when alone, however, she would inevitably sink into a dark depression. She loved her two children and enjoyed caring for them, but Ted was seldom around. He was either off to Vietnam, looking into the plight of war refugees, or when in town, at his office until the wee hours of the morning working on duties having to do with the Senate committees (the Labor, Veteran’s Affairs, Aging, and Judiciary subcommittees) on which he had been placed. Even when her husband was home, though, Joan knew that she did not have his undivided attention. She could not adjust to having a philandering husband, and it still tormented her that she wasn’t “good enough” for Ted.

  Making matters worse for Joan, most of the senators’ wives, the women with whom Joan would spend the bulk of her days, were from another generation, being as much as thirty years older than her. Rather than think of her as a peer, a “girlfriend,” they were maternal toward Joan and treated her like a daughter. They spoke of their grandchildren, while Joan was still raising her children. Because there wasn’t much common ground upon which to establish solid friendships with these women, Joan felt alone and isolated. Jackie could not be depended upon at this time; she had her own ordeal. Ethel could never be depended on, and she had never gotten close to her other sisters-in-law on the Kennedy side of the family.

  After Teddy Jr. and Kara went off to bed, Joan would find herself alone, night after lonely night, with nothing to do but pace the floors of her large home. When Ted would come home and crawl into bed with her, they still had what she thought was passion in their lovemaking, “which kept her on a hook,” said one friend of hers. “I don’t know if, for Ted, it was passion or just great sex. But most nights, she was alone.”

  “I’m going stir-crazy,” Joan recalls having complained to Ted. “I can only listen to Bach so many hours.” On evenings when she wasn’t expected at a political function, she had no one to chat with on the telephone or to visit, and so she drank.

  Unfortunately, Joan Kennedy’s frustrated nights alone, with only her supply of liquor as her companion, had become a matter of routine. In the process, the youngest senator’s wife would follow a genetic leaning and emotional pattern set by her own mother, Ginny, and one that, in time, would nearly destroy her life: alcoholism.

  Jackie’s Saddest Days

  At the same time that Ted and Joan moved into their new rented home, Jackie purchased a fourteen-room, brick town house close to them, at 3017 N Street in Georgetown, just down the street from the temporary home offered her by the Harrimans. Jackie’s new three-story, mottled-brick house featured a spacious drawing room with a fireplace and French doors leading out to a flagstone patio. To the right of a center hall was a dining room, and behind it, the kitchen, laundry room, and servants’ quarters. A large master bedroom was on the second floor, along with a study, a large dressing room, and a small office. On the third floor were four large bedrooms and a small workroom. All floors were accessible by an elevator at the front of the house.

  While Joan never had any company at her home, Jackie had more than she could handle at hers—and not anyone she had invited, either. Unfortunately, her new home had become a tourist mecca. Fans would line the street in front of it, hoping for a glimpse of the former First Lady, and would shout out “Jack-eee, Jack-eee.” Some of the braver ones would actually attempt to peer into her windows or knock on her door to ask for an autographed picture be
fore being told to leave by Secret Service agents. “I’m a freak now,” Jackie complained to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara one day when he came calling. “They’re like locusts,” she said of the fans. “They’re everywhere. It’s getting worse. Every day, it’s getting worse.”

  Night after lonely night, she would sort through Jack’s books, papers, and personal mementos, many of which she planned to send on the road in a traveling exhibit of JFK memorabilia. There was the tiny ancient statue of Herakles and the Skin of a Lion, which Jack had bought for himself while in Rome the June before his death; a book of poetry he had borrowed from Eunice and enjoyed too much to return; a handful of family snapshots that he carried with him everywhere he went—it all now had special and heart-wrenching meaning.

  Like Joan, Jackie found solace only by artificial means, by taking sedatives and antidepressants such as Amytal to get through the days and sleeping pills for the nights. She drank heavily, with vodka now her liquor of choice. Later, she would say that she played the events of the assassination over and over in her mind, wondering what she could have done differently, how she could have saved Jack’s life. She developed a pattern of awakening in the middle of the night, her body torn by dry sobs and shudders. During the day she would be completely fatigued, an exhausting kind of sadness hanging over her.

  One afternoon, according to Jackie’s Secret Service agents, Jackie and Joan met in Washington for one of their intimate lunches, which in the past had usually centered on Jackie counseling Joan about Ted’s philandering. This time, there was no consolation coming from Jackie. The tables were turned.