First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  Just weeks after John Kennedy’s victory over Richard Nixon, Jackie gave birth to a son, and within days, she was announcing through her social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, “sweeping changes [so the White House would become] a showcase of American art and history.”8 Following this precedent-breaking, pre-inaugural announcement, Jackie assembled a large staff, until eventually Baldrige reported that she had “forty people … in the First Lady’s Secretariat.”9 Not all of them could boast the credentials of Baldrige, who came well prepared for the job. The daughter of a congressman, she was a veteran of American embassies in both Rome and Paris, and she had been on the Kennedy staff since the summer of 1960, well before the outcome of the election was clear.

  Astute observers did not fail to note how the wife of the presidentelect tailored her public statements to complement his upbeat, energetic approach to the office. While John Kennedy incorporated phrases about a “new frontier,” his wife talked of “new beginnings” and the “best” of everything. The New Yorker, in an amusing article entitled “Mrs. Kennedy’s Cabinet,” underlined the parallels when it compared the Kennedys’ appointments. Both John and Jackie had included Republicans (Letitia Baldrige and Douglas Dillon), the New Yorker pointed out, and both had rewarded early boosters (in her case, the hairdresser Kenneth). Their most important selections, however, had come slowly, with both Kennedys announcing on the same day the designer of her inaugural wardrobe (Oleg Cassini) and his secretary of state (Dean Rusk). Both Cassini and Rusk had been, the New Yorker explained, “rather dark horses.”10

  As soon as her husband was sworn in, the new First Lady moved to leave her imprint on his administration. Old tensions about whether a president’s wife should stress humility in order to appeal to the people or set herself apart at a royal distance went all the way back to the Monroe administration. Jackie Kennedy quickly took her place in the elitist camp. Within a week of the inauguration, she had begun her campaign to upgrade the taste of the nation. On January 25, she met with an old friend, the artist William Walton, and experts from the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Gallery to discuss plans for restoring to the White House its original furnishings.11 That same afternoon she took tea with George Balanchine, the Russian choreographer who then headed the New York City Ballet. By the end of her first week on the job, she had made clear that although she had listed her priorities in the same order as had Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower, placing husband and children first, she meant to perform in a very different way.

  For a start, she meant to gain notice, and she began in what had traditionally been the province of presidential wives. Each White House family had enjoyed considerable freedom to choose what to bring into the mansion and what to throw out. Over the years many valuable pieces had simply disappeared—sold at auction or carted off as junk. Presidents did not usually involve themselves in the decisions (James Monroe and Chester Arthur were the notable exceptions), and wives could choose to reflect their own personal preferences or treat the mansion as a museum of the country’s treasures. Following structural renovations in the 1920s, Grace Coolidge had prevailed on Congress to pass legislation permitting the president to accept appropriate antiques, but so few were forthcoming that the law had little effect. Lou Hoover had attempted to stimulate interest in the White House by asking a secretary-friend to write a book on the subject, but depression times were hardly conducive to attracting donations of the Federal or Early Empire styles.

  The early 1960s found Americans in a more giving mood, especially when a popular First Lady and new tax laws encouraged them in their generosity. Television did its part by making Jackie Kennedy a celebrity. During her first year in the White House, two networks produced documentaries, showing how she had popularized the pillbox hat, bouffant hairstyles, and the name “Jacqueline” for baby girls. No one could explain exactly why she had achieved such instant stardom, but one commentator suggested that she appealed to the country’s fascination with youth. The youngest First Lady since the 1890s, she underlined her youth by being frequently photographed with her two little children. More subtly, however, Jackie Kennedy offered a new model of womanliness. Here was a First Lady who seemed acquainted with Europe, informed about literature and the arts, yet attractive enough to compete with movie actresses and sex symbols. The “dumb blond” stereotypes of the 1950s appeared curiously dated, and NBC concluded its adulatory program on Jackie Kennedy with the question: “Whatever became of Brigitte Bardot?”12

  This enormous popularity helped promote the campaign to furnish the White House with authentic antiques. The First Lady prevailed on wealthy individuals to contribute, assembled a professional staff to oversee the collection, and engaged scholars to give guidance and advice.13 To insure that her efforts could not be cancelled by a successor with different tastes, she secured passage of legislation making the furnishings of the White House of “historic or artistic interest … to be inalienable and the property of the White House.”14 John Kennedy feared that she might be criticized for extravagance, so it was arranged that the sale of White House guidebooks, which began July 4, 1962, would help finance the project.

  Jackie Kennedy’s efforts to restore the White House (she did not like the term redecorate) received considerable publicity, including a one-hour special on national television during which millions of viewers watched her move through the mansion and describe the provenance and significance of the furnishings and artworks. Jack Gould, television reviewer for the New York Times, pronounced her an extremely able historian, art critic, and narrator, but even such an admirer as he could not fail to notice that she sidestepped the substantive questions. When narrator Charles Collingswood asked her what relationship the federal government should have with the arts, she thought it too “complicated” to answer but she reiterated her view that the White House deserved “only the best.”15

  But something besides Jackie Kennedy’s interest in art came through that night. In escorting television cameras around the White House, she projected the image of a little girl, her breathy and hesitant, Marilyn Monroe–type voice moving over a very narrow pitch range. For those viewers who had seen Jackie at her television debut on the Edward R. Murrow “Person-to-Person” program in 1953, this appearance marked some progress. A new bride at that time (the program was entitled “Senator John Kennedy and His Bride”), she had said very little, and her incongruous holding of a football during the time she was on screen caused some viewers to wonder if she had anything to say.

  Her participation in the televised tour of the White House in early 1962 was more than a personal milestone. Harry Truman had escorted television crews around the renovated White House in his administration, and Tricia Nixon would later perform this task for her father. Jackie did not come across as exactly professorial, but she did inject a somewhat worldly note, and she signalled the possibility that a president’s wife could bring some of her own interests to the job of First Lady, at least as long as those interests remained traditionally feminine. As a New York Times reporter observed: “It is now all right for a woman to be a bit brainy or cultured as long as she tempers her intelligence with a ‘t’rific’ girlish rhetoric.”16 This was a small beginning in altering attitudes about what constituted femininity, but it marked a change from Mamie Eisenhower’s unwillingness to show that she could think and Bess Truman’s reluctance to be seen.

  Jackie rationed her appearances—even those at family gatherings. Her cousin John Davis explained how a group of Bouviers and Auchinclosses proceeded to the White House after the inaugural parade, but the new First Lady would not come downstairs to see them, even after her mother went to intercede. True, the schedule of a president’s wife at inauguration time is packed, and Jackie had given birth by Caesarean section only two months earlier, but her relatives were understandably bewildered by her treatment—to them, she was, according to Davis, “just Jackie.”17

  Most Americans remained oblivious, of course, to tensions within the Bouvier-Auchincloss
clan, but they could read in any newspaper that the new president’s wife had little time for the luncheons and teas that typically filled a First Lady’s calendar. Citing obligations to her children, Jackie Kennedy simply refused to go. Sometimes she sent her husband or her secretary or enlisted the vice president’s wife, but she adamantly preserved most of her time for herself. Her refusals to appear caused considerable embarrassment to those left with the task of inventing excuses for her. Katie Louchheim, an active Democratic Party regular, acknowledged that she could not persuade Jackie to meet even briefly with the consort of an important South American, although the visitor was such an ardent admirer of the American First Lady that she had brought a piece of her wedding silver as a gift.18

  Although reporters later grumbled about Jackie’s failure to cooperate with them, they continued to turn out flattering copy. Even Margaret Mead, the anthropologist who wrote regularly for Redbook, climbed aboard the press’s pro-Kennedy bandwagon and suggested that the new First Lady had managed to alter Americans’ ideas about White House occupants. Allowed little freedom to voice their own opinions or expose their own tastes, most First Ladies had attempted to remain discreetly unobtrusive, but not Jackie Kennedy, who, Mead explained, had “gladdened the eye” and awakened Americans to their cultural heritage.19

  Mead’s analysis, stated in such general terms, missed an important point about the Kennedy years. Several of Jackie’s predecessors, especially the young ones such as Julia Tyler and Frances Cleveland, had “gladdened the eyes” of their countrymen and women, but none had done so in quite the same way. Many of the others had contented themselves with echoing the administration line and staying close to home. Jackie Kennedy insisted on being her own person—breaking all kinds of precedents for First Ladies by going off on her own extended vacations. Previous presidents’ wives had limited themselves to dutiful family trips (such as Bess Truman’s summers with her mother and daughter in Independence) or to serious, fact-finding missions (such as Eleanor Roosevelt’s car trips to both the East and West coasts) but none gained the attention of Jackie’s luxury-packed international forays. She often vacationed away from Washington without her husband, yachting one time in the Mediterranean with Aristotle Onassis and friends, another time riding elephants in India with her sister, still another summer introducing her daughter Caroline to the sights of Italy.

  Jackie evidently gave considerable attention to leaving her mark as First Lady—her correspondence with Eleanor Roosevelt on the topic and her determined effort to restore the White House would argue that she meant to be no slouch—but she refused to include subservient wifeliness in her definition of First Lady. For those political wives who sacrificed all individuality in order to fit themselves into a faceless mold, she showed considerable contempt, and her reported comment that Lady Bird Johnson would crawl down Pennsylvania Avenue on broken glass for Lyndon reveals more about the speaker than the subject.20

  Not surprisingly, her record involved many contradictions. Although she was sometimes pictured as a rather spoiled princess, she persisted with projects she considered worthwhile, such as the White House restoration which she had been “warned, begged and practically threatened,” she said, not to undertake.21 Aloof and unapproachable in a country that stressed friendly casualness in its leaders, she managed to remain much admired. Even the country’s historians got caught up in the contradictions in her appeal. Long after she had left the White House, one hundred American professors rated her sixth among all twentieth-century First Ladies, but in “integrity,” that supposed sine qua non of government, they rated her last.22

  Even her femininity involved contradictions. Soft-spoken, yet assertive, she refused to concern herself with important national or international issues although she appeared intelligent enough to do so. Both John and Robert Kennedy underlined this interpretation of her role. Robert, the attorney general, noted approvingly that she was the kind of wife who would not worry her husband at the end of a long day with, “What’s new in Laos?” John Kennedy made the same point when he said, “I don’t have to fight the day’s political battles over again at night.”23

  Like many politically ambitious men of his generation, John Kennedy had trouble taking women seriously, a trait possibly influenced by his parents’ distinction between the education of sons and daughters. The boys had the best preparatory training and Ivy League schools while the girls were enrolled in intellectually less rigorous women’s schools.24 In other important ways, the parents had set distinctly different models for their children. While Rose Kennedy had her children’s respect, she never received the homage they paid their father, whose brashness, blatant ambition, and separation of wife and family from other romantic interests contrasted sharply with Rose’s piety and dependence.25

  Later revelations of John Kennedy’s sexual activities in the White House would titillate readers and inspire television programs, but little was published on the subject before his death. Even the most casual White House observer could see, however, that a different model of wifeliness accompanied Camelot. Jackie Kennedy’s decision to play something other than the loyal wife may have resulted from John’s decision not to play dutiful husband; but regardless of the causes, it paved the way for future First Ladies to act on their own. Eleanor Roosevelt had been perceived as separate from Franklin, with her own friends and interests, but Franklin’s physical incapacity partly excused the deviation. John Kennedy was not disabled, but Jackie struck out anyway, thus helping prepare the way for her successors to maintain their own individuality.

  The Kennedy administration ended before the feminist movement of the 1960s got its full start, and most women’s magazines continued to present a model that included the old combination of kitchen, kids, and kindness to all. Diamonds and hope chests still dominated the thinking of most young women, while graduate schools cooperated by setting firm quotas to hold the line against female applicants. First-rate medical schools accepted only a handful of women in each class.

  The description of the Kennedy years as a kind of Camleot came from Jackie Kennedy in speaking to the writer T. H. White a few days after the assassination. Although she no doubt intended to make a different point, her description aptly fitted the mentality of the young president and his circle of close advisers who resembled chivalrous and energetic knights eager to do battle. John Kennedy named no women to his cabinet—although Dwight Eisenhower had—and none to any highly visible, powerful post although Janet Travell served as one of his personal physicians. Of all his appointments requiring Senate approval, less than 3 percent went to women, about the same as in the Eisenhower and Truman administrations.26

  India Edwards, a longtime Democratic Party regular, blamed the president’s “Irish Mafia” for excluding women from power, and she suggested John Kennedy viewed women as “nothing but sex objects.”27 Nan Dickerson, television correspondent and Kennedy friend, pronounced John Kennedy “the complete male chauvinist … and he thought it ridiculous to pay them the same as men.”28 Lady Barbara Ward, the British economist, told an interviewer after John Kennedy’s death: “[He] had little empathy for the trained, intelligent woman—he may have, but my impression is he hadn’t.”29

  John Kennedy’s appointment of the Commission on the Status of Women is often singled out as an important step in beginning the federal government’s move into guaranteeing women’s rights, but in light of his total record, his motives seem suspect. The impetus for that move came from Esther Peterson, a former lobbyist who had known John Kennedy in his Senate days. She worked for him in the 1960 campaign and then prevailed on him to take some action on women’s rights, which he did in spite of his own reluctance.30 By appointing the commission, John Kennedy deflected pressure to do something more substantive.

  Whether or not that record on women’s issues would have changed in a second Kennedy term remains unknowable. The First Lady had just returned from a vacation in Greece when she consented to make one of her rare political trips w
ith her husband. Partly to mend Democratic fences in preparation for the 1964 election, the president and vice president went together to Dallas, where, with the assassin’s bullet, the Kennedy administration ended. Thus it happened that Lyndon Johnson, unlike other vice presidents in similar circumstances, was there to be sworn into office on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, just ninety-nine minutes after John Kennedy died.

  The quickly improvised ceremony aboard Air Force One was delayed until Jackie Kennedy arrived; photographs of the inauguration show her standing, in a pink suit stained with her husband’s blood, alongside the grim-faced Johnsons. This marked an unprecedented appearance of an ex–First Lady, as though her presence might help confer legitimacy on the transition even though the details of the assassination—who killed John Kennedy and why—remained unclear. No woman widowed as First Lady had ever been present for the inauguration of her husband’s successor—even Eleanor Roosevelt did not attend Harry Truman’s inauguration in 1945 although she was still in the White House at the time.

  In planning for John Kennedy’s funeral, Jackie assumed a far more prominent, publicized role than had any of her predecessors in similar circumstances. Presidential widows had attended their husbands’ funerals since 1881, and both Florence Harding and Eleanor Roosevelt had made important decisions about the services, but none of them provided quite the drama Jackie Kennedy did.

  Six years earlier when her father died, she had amazed her relatives with her decisive orchestration of his funeral. She oversaw the flower arrangements, located a particularly appealing photograph, and insisted that the obituary be hand-delivered to the New York Times.31 Now turning that same determination and confident taste to her husband’s funeral, she chose the smaller St. Matthew’s rather than the huge Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. It was within walking distance of the White House so mourners could move toward it in a procession that combined the spirit of a western town at “High Noon” with the ritual of a Mediterranean village. Few from among millions of television viewers who watched the veiled, black-clad Jackie Kennedy walk behind her husband’s coffin would ever forget the sight. After the funeral, she stood to accept the condolences of leaders who had come from all over the world; and then, as though to assure a permanent reminder of her residence in the White House, she arranged for a plaque to be placed over the bedroom mantel recording the number of days that “John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline” had lived there. This last effort proved unnecessary, because she had stimulated such great interest in the White House and its occupants that no future First Lady could ignore her example.