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A Thousand Days

Page 80

by Arthur M. Schlesinger


  1. IN THE MANSION

  The day began at quarter to eight. George Thomas, his devoted and humorous Negro valet, would knock at the door of the Kennedy bedroom. As he sat down before his breakfast tray, surrounded by the morning papers and urgent cables and reports which may have come in during the night, Caroline and John would rush in, greet their father and turn on the television to watch animated cartoons. Then more presidential reading, with the television going full blast. At nine o’clock a calisthenics program came on, and Kennedy liked to watch the children tumble on the bedroom floor in rhythm with the man on the screen. Then, taking one of the children by the hand, he would walk over to the presidential office in the West Wing.

  After a morning of work and a swim, often with David Powers, in the White House pool, he returned to the Mansion for luncheon. He preferred to lunch alone or with Jacqueline; very occasionally he brought guests. After luncheon came the nap. Impressed by Churchill’s eloquence in praise of afternoon rest, he had begun this practice in the Senate. It was a genuine sleep, in pajamas and under covers. He went off at once; and in forty-five minutes would awaken and chat as he dressed. This was Jacqueline’s hour of the day, as the morning was the children’s.

  This historian, it must be said, had not realized how constricted the living quarters of an American President were. The first floor of the Mansion was given over to public rooms and reserved for state occasions. The third floor was rarely mentioned. The private life of the Kennedys took place on the second floor under conditions which an average Park Avenue tycoon would regard as claustrophobic. A long dark corridor, brightened by a set of Catlin’s Indian paintings, transected the floor. Bedrooms debouched from each side. A yellow oval room, marvelously light and lovely, was used for tea or drinks before dinner; it had served earlier Presidents as an office. Another room at the west end of the corridor was Jacqueline’s room by day and the sitting room in the evening. Dinner guests resorted to the President’s own bathroom. It was not a house for spacious living. Yet, until Theodore Roosevelt persuaded the Congress to build the West Wing, Presidents not only raised their families in these crowded quarters but ran the country from them.

  It never seemed unduly crowded in these days. The atmosphere was always one of informality. When his family was away, the President used to have his afternoon appointments on the second floor. But generally he returned to the West Wing after his nap, where he worked until seven-thirty or eight at night. Jacqueline liked to guard the evenings for relaxation, and the President welcomed the relief from the incessant business of the day. These were the times when he confided public affairs to his subconscious mind, exposed himself to new people and ideas and recharged his intellectual energies. One of Jacqueline’s charms, Robert Kennedy once said, was that “Jack knows she’ll never greet him with ‘What’s new in Laos?’” From time to time, of course, she did, as one crisis or another dominated the headlines, and he would tell Bundy to show her the cables. But her central effort was to assure him a sanctuary of comfort and affection.

  After the first year, they left the White House very seldom for private dinners elsewhere, though Kennedy always enjoyed the food and conversation at Joseph Alsop’s. Instead, Jacqueline would arrange small dinners of six, eight or ten in the Mansion. They were informal and gay, the most agreeable occasions in the world. One memorable evening celebrated Stravinsky’s seventy-fifth birthday. The composer, who had been rehearsing all day, was both excited and tired. A Chicago newspaper publisher, also present, insisted on talking across him at dinner to the President about such issues as Katanga and Medicare. Stravinsky said to me later, “They were speaking about matters which I did not understand and about which I did not care. I became an alien in their midst.” But then the President toasted him and Stravinsky, obviously moved, responded with immense charm. On less formal evenings Jacqueline would sometimes put on phonograph records and there might be a moment of dancing. The President often vanished silently into his bedroom to work or make phone calls, reappearing in time to bid his guests goodnight. Occasionally there were films in the projection room in the East Wing. Kennedy was not a great movie fan and tended, unless the film was unusually gripping, to walk out after the first twenty or thirty minutes.*

  Private relationships are always a puzzle for Presidents. “The Presidency,” Kennedy once remarked, “is not a very good place to make new friends”—or sometimes to keep old ones either. They watched with fascination how White Housitis affected their acquaintances, leading some to grievance and others to sycophancy and discussed a book which might be written called “The Poison of the Presidency.” By 1963 the dinners became somewhat less frequent. More and more the President fell back on the easy and reliable company of tried friends—William Walton, the Benjamin Bradlees, the Charles Bartletts, the David Ormsby Gores, the Franklin Roosevelts.

  The state dinners were inevitable, but Jacqueline made them bearable by ending the old regimented formality of solemn receiving lines and stilted conversation and changing them into elegant and cheerful parties, beautifully mingling informality and dignity. When asked about White House dinners, people would now say with surprise that they really had a very good time. But the gala occasions were the small dinner dances. Jacqueline conceived them as a means of restoring a larger social gaiety to her husband’s life. When several months of unrelenting pressure had gone by, she would feel that the time had come for another dancing party and begin to look for a pretext to give one, whether to say hello or farewell to the Radziwills, welcome Kenneth Galbraith or honor Eugene Black. There were not many such parties—only five in the whole time in the White House—and they were all blithe and enchanting evenings. The President seemed renewed by them and walked with a springier step the next day.

  The Kennedys liked to preserve the weekends as much as possible for themselves and the children. In 1961 they took a house at Glen Ora in Virginia; but the President found it confining and in later years preferred to go to Roosevelt’s old refuge of Shangri-La at Catoctin Mountain in Maryland, renamed by Eisenhower Camp David after his grandson. In the winter there was Palm Beach, where they went for longer periods at Christmas and Easter, and in the summer Hyannis Port and Newport. Sailing relaxed him most of all—the sun, the breeze, the water; above all, no telephone. He could get along quite happily even without the sun and used to insist on taking his friends out on dark and chilly days. The guests would huddle together against the cold while the President sat in the stern in a black sweater, the wind blowing his hair, blissfully happy with a steaming bowl of fish chowder.

  The weekends and holidays, despite his battered black alligator briefcase stuffed with papers, gave him time for the children, but he saw them as much as possible during the week, and his delight in them was unconcealed. He loved children and told Jacqueline before their marriage that he wanted at least five; she had four in seven years. He liked young children in particular and always wanted a baby coming along when its predecessor was growing up. Caroline and John were, as the world came to know, wonderfully spirited and original, and they cast their spell throughout the White House. One often encountered them in the corridors going out to their morning nursery school. One morning I said to Caroline, “Who is your friend?” She replied with dignity, “He’s not my friend; he’s my brother.” They invaded the West Wing, took candies from a box kept for them on Evelyn Lincoln’s desk and liked to hide from their father under the cabinet table.

  Often at the end of the day the President would leave his desk, throw open the French windows leading into the Rose Garden, walk out on the colonnade and clap his hands. At this signal every child and dog in the vicinity would rush across the green lawn into his arms. He would encourage John to dance, clapping his hands again as the accompaniment. In the evening he made up stories for them about Caroline hunting with the Orange County hounds and winning the Grand National and John in his PT boat sinking a Japanese destroyer. He would tell them about Bobo the Lobo, a giant, and about Maybelle, a littl
e girl who hid in the woods, and about the White Shark and the Black Shark. The White Shark lived off people’s socks, and one day, when the President and Caroline were sailing with Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., off Newport, Kennedy pretended to see the White Shark and said, “Franklin, give him your socks; he’s hungry.” Franklin promptly threw his socks into the water, which made a great impression on Caroline. And her father taught Caroline poetry:

  Where the bee sucks, there suck I;

  In a cowslip’s bell I lie.

  There I couch when owls do cry.

  For her part Jacqueline was determined that the children lead as normal lives as possible. This was not an easy goal for the young children of a President, but she did her best, arranging the White House nursery school where they could fraternize with their contemporaries and taking them off in her blue Pontiac station wagon on quiet expeditions to shops or parks. On Halloween evening in 1962, the doorbell rang at my house in Georgetown. When my fourteen-year-old daughter opened the door to the trick-or-treaters, she found a collection of small hobgoblins leaping up and down. One seemed particularly eager to have her basket filled with goodies. After a moment a masked mother in the background called out that it was time to go to their next house. Christina suddenly recognized the voice. It was, of course, Jackie, and the excited little girl was Caroline out with her cousins. They had just rung Joe Alsop’s bell; Dean Acheson was the next stop.

  Such adventures varied their lives. John and Caroline were not, if their mother could help it, the little prince and princess, any more than she and the President were royalty. She disapproved of the term “First Lady,” which had come into semi-official usage in the previous administration. When she heard the servants referring to her by the title, she told them her name was “Mrs. Kennedy.” She constantly reminded the children that the White House was their temporary residence, not their permanent home. When Mrs. Longworth or Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., came to dinner, she would explain that they had once lived in the White House too, as Caroline and John were living there now.

  The White House was temporary for the Kennedys but permanent for the nation. Mrs. Eisenhower had taken her successor on a trip around the Mansion in November 1960. It was too soon after John’s birth, and Jacqueline was desperately weak after the Caesarean operation. She trudged through the historic rooms, long since emptied of the authentic past, now filled with mediocre reproductions; it seemed almost as if this were a house in which nothing had ever taken place. She resolved on the spot to establish the President’s residence thereafter as unequivocally the nation’s house and transform it into a house of which the nation could be thoroughly proud. She asked the Library of Congress to send books about the historic White House to her at Palm Beach. Between Christmas and the inauguration she immersed herself in the literature. The restoration of the White House became her special project.

  Her hope was to recover as many as possible of the old and beautiful objects which past Presidents had cherished and make the President’s house both a distillation of American history and an expression of American excellence. “Everything in the White House must have a reason for being there,” she said. “It would be sacrilege merely to ‘redecorate’ it—a word I hate. It must be restored—and that has nothing to do with decoration. That is a question of scholarship.” Her husband sent Clark Clifford to help her with her plans. But Clifford, remembering the furor over the innocuous balcony Truman had added to the south portico, was dubious; “you just can’t make any changes in the White House,” he said. Jacqueline, however, soon talked him around and with his help set up the White House Historical Association. She enlisted Henry du Pont, James Fosburgh and others on a Committee of the Fine Arts Commission for the White House and procured legislation designating the White House as a museum and enabling it to receive gifts. The restoration program went speedily ahead. Exploring the White House basement herself, she uncovered a superbly carved desk made of oak timbers from a British frigate and installed it in the presidential office in the West Wing. Soon she pushed through the publication of the first White House guidebook in the nation’s history. It was a formidable executive effort, but she carried it out with a perfectionist’s attention to detail, steely determination and lovely command.

  The President gave her his full support, applauded as the inherited furniture was carted away and watched the transformation with mounting pride. He was rather complacent about the knowledge of décor he had acquired under her tutelage and liked to point out to visitors the objects which she had brought back to their original home. The success of the guidebook pleased him, and he kidded those on the staff who had said gloomily that it would never do to sell a guidebook in the White House. He congratulated her as the number of people going through the White House steadily rose: in 1962 the total was nearly two-thirds greater than in 1960. In February 1962, when Mrs. Kennedy took the whole nation on a television tour of the new White House, the President viewed the program with great satisfaction. (As for Jacqueline, when Norman Mailer complained about her voice in Esquire and wrote that she walked through the program “like a starlet who is utterly without talent,” she took no offense and thought he was probably right.)

  Her husband’s delight in her was visible. His eyes brightened when he talked of her or when she unexpectedly dropped by the office. He was even entertained by her occasional bursts of undiplomatic candor. “Whenever a wife says anything in this town,” he remarked in high amusement one night at dinner at the White House, “everyone assumes that she is saying what her husband really thinks. Imagine how I felt last night when I thought I heard Jackie telling Malraux that Adenauer was ‘tin peu gaga’!”

  He adored her because she remained utterly faithful to herself—and the nation, for all its earlier reservations, came to adore her for the same reason. The things people had once held against her—the unconventional beauty, the un-American elegance, the taste for French clothes and French food—were suddenly no longer liabilities but assets. She represented all at once not a negation of her country but a possible fulfillment of it, a suggestion that America was not to be trapped forever in the bourgeois ideal, a dream of civilization and beauty. She had dreaded coming to the White House, fearing the end of family and privacy. But life for herself and her husband and children was never more intense and more complete. It turned out to be the time of the greatest happiness.

  2. IN THE OFFICE

  It has been traditional for Presidents to curse the Presidency. Washington said he felt like “a culprit, who is going to the place of his execution.” Jefferson called the Presidency a “splendid misery,” Buchanan “a crown of thorns”; for Truman the White House was “the finest prison in the country.” Such melodramatic lamentations never escaped the lips of John F. Kennedy. He had wanted to become President, he loved being President and at times he could hardly remember that he had ever been anything else. He never complained about the ‘terrible loneliness’ of the office or its ‘awesome burdens.’ I do not think he felt terribly lonely; as he once remarked to William Manchester, “In many ways I see and hear more than anyone else.” (He regarded his life, I think, as threatened more by confinement than by solitude; occasionally at the end of the day he would say, almost wistfully, “What are you doing tonight?” and then enjoy a moment of gossip about old friends in Georgetown.) As for those ‘awesome burdens,’ he had asked for them, knowing more or less what he was getting into, and would not repine now.

  His presidential life was instinct with action. “He did everything around here today,” James Reston wrote of a not uncharacteristic day, “but shinny up the Washington Monument.” Once, driving with Ben Bradlee during the interregnum, while a small Bradlee child scrambled between the front and back seats, Kennedy said, “I suppose if you had to choose just one quality to have that would be it: vitality.” But his own vitality was under sure control. He had written years before about his brother Joe: “Even when still, there was always a sense of motion forcibly restrained.” This was pr
eeminently true of the President himself.

  Seated at his desk or in the rocking chair in front of the fireplace, immaculately dressed in one of his two-buttoned, single-breasted suits, he radiated a contained energy, electric in its intensity. Occasionally it would break out, especially during long and wandering meetings. His fingers gave the clue to his impatience. They would suddenly be in constant action, drumming the table, tapping his teeth, slashing impatient pencil lines on a pad, jabbing the air to underscore a point. Sometimes the constraint of the four walls seemed too much, and he would stride across the room, pausing wryly to look at the mass of indentations left on the floor by his predecessor’s golf cleats, throw open the doors to the lawn and walk up and down the colonnade. One day, while talking, he rose from his desk, picked up his cane, inverted it and started making golf swings; then, looking up with a smile, he said, “I’m getting to be more like Ike every day!”

  He had to an exceptional degree the talent for concentration. When he put on his always surprising horn-rimmed glasses and read a document, it was with total intentness; in a moment he would have seized its essence and returned to the world he had left. He was for the same reason a superb listener. “Whoever he’s with,” someone said, “he’s with them completely.” He would lean forward, his eyes protruding slightly, concerned with using the occasion not to expound his own thoughts but to drag out of the talker whatever could be of use to him. Isaiah Berlin was reminded of a remark made about Lenin: that he could exhaust people by listening to them. In this way he ventilated problems in great detail without revealing his own position and without making his visitors conscious that he was holding back.

  His manners were distinguished, and the more timid or lowly the people, the greater his consideration. “Mr. Kennedy’s almost awesome egalitarianism,” Secret Service Chief Baughman later wrote, was “in some ways even greater than Mr. Truman’s.” His moments of irritation were occasional but short. They came generally because he felt that he had been tricked, or because a crisis caught him without warning, or because someone in the government had leaked something to the press. The air would rock for a moment; his years in the Navy and in Massachusetts politics had not been in vain and, when pressed, his vocabulary was vivid. But, though he got mad quickly, he stayed mad briefly. He was a man devoid of hatred. He detested qualities but not people. Calm would soon descend, and in time the irritation would become a matter for jokes.

 

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