by Tina Cassidy
But renovating the White House was more than a patriotic calling. It was an outlet for a very smart woman. She once told a reporter during the 1960 presidential campaign while giving a tour of their Georgetown home, “I love my house! It is my expression of myself.”53
In addition to the White House interview with Sidey, she agreed to tape a special tour for television. On Valentine’s Day 1962, all of America—or at least those with TVs—would be treated to a one-hour broadcast of Jackie explaining her White House work. The Kennedys were no different than everyone else eagerly awaiting the start of the show at 10:00 PM. They had invited some people over to join them for the viewing, with drinks and dinner at the White House before it aired, including Benjamin C. Bradlee, then of Newsweek, and his wife, Tony. Despite the fact it was Valentine’s Day and he was in the company of friends, the president was in a foul mood.
“My wife went so far as to say later that she felt the president was actually jealous of Jackie’s performance and the attention she got as a result,” Bradlee wrote in his diary later that night.54
The group gathered around a TV near the Lincoln Room to watch the show on NBC, which had been taped a month earlier during a session that took nearly eight hours, at a production cost of more than $250,000.55 They were rapt and in virtual silence as they watched Jackie, in a dark two-piece wool bouclé day dress by Rodier, whose red color was lost on the black-and-white program.56
The televised tour began in the curator’s office on the ground floor and moved to the Diplomatic Reception Room. The camera took in the original kitchen, which FDR had used as a broadcast room, and showed how the space had become an upholstery shop as well as an office space where Jackie and Pearce were producing a 132-page guidebook—something Jackie had wanted since her very first visit to the White House—and that they had been working on for a year. (She had to lobby the president to get him to agree to it because his staff was complaining it would be “an outrage” and a desecration to do something so commercial.)57 Then they went on to the East Room, where balls take place, the State Dining Room, which was set with a gold-and-white tablecloth and china, as well as the Red, Blue, and Green rooms—all difficult to grasp without Technicolor. The show skipped over the Library because it was not yet ready.58
Jackie explained in a soft voice from the TV what the history, the relevance, and the reasoning was behind the placement of various pieces in the White House, while thanking those who gifted them as part of the permanent collection.
Near the end of the show, the president briefly joined his wife on-camera in the Monroe Room, which was then still in the process of being renovated as the president’s cabinet room. The president extolled Jackie’s work, explained why it was so important that the White House reflect the living history of the republic, and then said two memorable things on-camera. First, he said, “Past is prologue.” Second, the president said that maybe some of the White House visitors would be inspired to return as residents. “Even the girls.”
The camera panned to Jackie, who would win an Emmy for her work. She blinked and showed no expression.59
While 50 million viewers went to bed that night marveling at the White House renovation (millions more would see it in the UK on BBC), far fewer were aware of the other major preservation story playing out that same day at Washington’s Lafayette Square, in which Jackie was also embroiled.
Lafayette Square was a quadrangle of intimate nineteenth-century Federalist-style townhomes around a green where diplomats, publishers, cabinet members, and other American notables such as Dolley Madison and Daniel Webster had lived. The square was quite literally the traditional front yard of the White House until Pennsylvania Avenue cut between them. Pierre L’Enfant, who had designed the Capitol after being appointed by George Washington, referred to the square in his plans as the “President’s Park.”60
By 1957, with the federal government expanding and the square falling into disrepair, President Eisenhower had targeted many of the buildings around Lafayette Square for demolition. Initially, Eisenhower wanted to replace the homes with a modernist executive office building that would occupy an entire block. Those who lived and worked in the targeted buildings complained.61 Then-senator John F. Kennedy initially fought on their behalf. But the government’s plan, backed by Congress, plodded along.
In his first week as president, Kennedy enlisted an old friend, Bill Walton, to help him find a solution for Lafayette Square. Walton was an artist and former war correspondent for Time-Life and was a longtime pal of JFK’s, a frequent Hyannis Port houseguest, and after the inauguration his friendship and loyalty had been rewarded with insider status.
Walton did not like the Eisenhower plans and showed them to Jackie. “They’re wildly unattractive plans for modern government,” he said. She agreed it was not the kind of architecture she wanted facing the White House.
“Until the bulldozers move, we’re ahead and you can’t give up,” she told Walton, who knew she meant it.62
The papers began calling Walton the czar of Lafayette Square. But he struggled to find an alternative that made everyone happy. Like most things in Washington, politics was interfering. Congress was applying pressure and requiring that the new space have a certain amount of square footage, which could not be built, according to the assessment of two Boston architectural firms, if the homes facing the square were saved.
Walton was buckling. He told the president that the Dolley Madison house, built in 1820 and a place where Mrs. Madison held social teas in her post–White House years, had been completely changed when it was remodeled as the Cosmos Club in 1895 and had lost its historical significance; it was then serving as government offices. He said the Tayloe House and the Belasco Theatre had also been stripped of their importance, leaving only one building—the Decatur House, built in 1818—worth saving.
To the alarm of preservationists—including his own wife—the president took Walton’s advice and approved some of the plans. Jackie was furious with Walton and her husband, who clearly had larger issues to deal with, including Khrushchev, de Gaulle, and nuclear weapons testing.
But newspapers were reporting that the president was caving on Lafayette Square.
“President Kennedy had briefly raised the traditionalists’ hopes that a last-minute rescue would save the [Lafayette] Square’s town-green atmosphere from the wrecker’s ball and functional Federal architecture. Despite shots still being fired by lovers of the status quo, the president is not expected to halt the razing of most of the old houses and buildings on the east and west sides of the square,” the New York Times reported on the day Jackie’s White House tour aired.63 (The story was another likely reason for JFK’s discontent that night.)
Jackie went to work as a preservationist once again—the very next day. On February 15, 1962, she asked David Finley, then chairman of the US Commission of Fine Arts, to take a walk around Lafayette Square with her64 and understand why the proposed buildings were out of line.
“In France,” she told him, with the White House in the backdrop, “there is a law providing that certain buildings of historical or architectural importance could not be destroyed. It would be nice for Congress to have such a law.
“Mr. Finley,” she urged, “these building can be preserved. And they must.”
Finley told her that the president and the US Commission of Fine Arts had already signed off on the plans, but that the final decision would be made by Boutin at the General Services Administration, the independent agency that oversees the basic functioning of federal agencies, such as procurement and cost minimizing. After her walk with Finley, she reached out to Boutin right away, who told her the contracts had already been signed.
But Boutin heard her intense desire to stop the plan and told her he’d prevent any further money to be spent until they had a strategy in place.
“I’ll slow it right down to a walk,” he told her.
Although she was busy getting ready for what would be her iconic trip t
o India and Pakistan with her sister the next week, Jackie followed up her conversation with an impassioned letter to Boutin, again employing flattery and charm. “Unfortunately, last summer the president okayed some plans for buildings; he was in a hurry, he doesn’t have time to bother himself with details like this, he trusted the advice of a friend … and I really don’t think it was the right advice,” she wrote. “With all he has to do, at least I can spare him some minor problems like this. So I turn to you for help … All architects are innovators and would rather do something totally new than in the spirit of old buildings. I think they are totally wrong in this case, as the important thing is to preserve the 19th-century feeling of Lafayette Square … Write to the architects and tell them to submit a design that is more in keeping with the 19th-century bank on the corner. It should be the same color, same size, etc.”65
Boutin was impressed that “she could see right off quick that the previous architect had a vested interest in having the new buildings developed.”
While Jackie and Lee were in India in March 1962, riding on elephants, meeting with Prime Minister Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, and visiting the Taj Mahal and other historic sites, the president knew that when she came back, she would be more—not less—convinced of her position on Lafayette Square. He needed a plan. By sheer coincidence, architect Jack Warnecke was in Washington and called his Stanford fraternity brother Red Fay (then undersecretary of the navy), who invited him to a reception in the Oval Office the next day. Kennedy had met Warnecke in California and heard about his playing left tackle on the undefeated Stanford football team, which lead to Kennedy’s nickname for him.
“Rosebowl! What the hell are you doing here?” the president asked Warnecke when he spotted the San Franciscan in the Oval Office. The two talked briefly—the president was distracted by several lovely women in attendance—and then the next day Kennedy asked Fay what Warnecke did for a living.
“He’s a very successful architect,” Fay said.
“Have him call me tomorrow morning at nine-thirty. Jackie is very upset about the plans for the new building to be put up on Lafayette Square. She feels that what they are planning will ruin the beauty and historic charm of this area, and I agree with her.”66
After the debriefing, Warnecke was told to call Walton with a new scheme.
On the surface, Warnecke would have seemed an unlikely savior. He had been trained by Walter Gropius, the godfather of modernism—the movement that was at the root of all this tearing down—at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where Breuer had taught. But much of what Gropius and other modernists such as Le Corbusier had stood for was being challenged by a New York housewife named Jane Jacobs, who in 1961 published a seminal book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The book criticized modernist planning policies that she claimed were destroying many urban enclaves. Jackie, a voracious reader, had most likely read the influential book. Warnecke, meanwhile, had developed a reputation for contextual architecture, blending the old and the new in ways that were both comfortable and exciting—precisely what he designed for Lafayette Square. His plan, approved by Jackie, allowed for the construction of an office building and a courthouse—set back from the street, without taking a wrecking ball to most of the square. Essentially the buildings would be constructed behind the old facades. Furthermore, the Madison house would be restored by removing exterior stucco.
“Underneath is the original brick, in as good shape as that on Decatur House across the square,” Warnecke reported.67
Jackie won. Many of the historic facades would remain, and the new development would be set back in a less noticeable way.
A few weeks after that walk through the square, Finley decided to step down as chairman of the Fine Arts Commission and Jackie wrote an impassioned twelve-page handwritten letter full of exclamation points on White House stationery to Walton, urging him to become Finley’s successor or else “lovely buildings will be torn down—+ cheesy skyscrapers go up—Perhaps saving old buildings + having the 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 + it won’t ever come + so to save the old—+ to make the new beautiful is terribly important—and the real estate operators are your enemy.”68
Jackie reviewing plans for Lafayette Square with architect John Warnecke (left) and GSA administrator Bernard Boutin. She is wearing the same Chanel suit that she wore on the day of the assassination. (Courtesy of JFK Library)
Jackie’s success fed her desire to do more about the square. Boutin noticed that “the refurbishment of the White House really got her started and then she never took another breath, she just kept going.” Rarely a day went by when he did not at least get a call from her wanting to know how the new plans for Lafayette Square were progressing. He would take new drawings to the White House and go over them with her, laying out the drawings on the floor and reviewing them on hands and knees.
By October 1962, the plans had progressed enough such that Jackie was ready to unveil them to the media. And she orchestrated that event, too. As her car pulled up to the GSA building for the press conference, Boutin was waiting. In a check skirt suit with her hair swept up in a beehive with bangs, Jackie walked into the auditorium saying repeatedly to him, “Bernie, remember, not me, the president.”
Whether it was false modesty or she was truly being the ever-political wife, Jackie wanted to be on the record that her husband should receive all of the credit for the win. But the mere fact that she had to remind Boutin to do so was an admission that she had been the driving force, the will to get it done at a time when the president couldn’t because, as the most powerful man in the world, how could he micromanage his front yard?
Also, despite the fact that she never answered any questions during the event—except when one reporter asked off topic about the crabgrass on the White House lawn—her mere presence at the press conference ensured that she would be photographed inspecting the architectural model of two new large buildings set behind the historic facades. And that would get people to pay attention in a way they might not even if her husband were in the photo.
“I believe that the importance of Lafayette Square lies in the fact that we were not willing to destroy our cultural and historic heritage,” Boutin announced, reading from the president’s letter, “but that we were willing to find means of preserving it while still meeting the requirements of growth in government.”69
This is not to say all would be saved. The old Belasco Theatre on Madison Place would make room for an arched entryway to the new US Court of Claims and the US Court of Customs and Patent Appeals. And the buildings that once served as the headquarters for the National Grange and the Brookings Institution would meet the wrecking ball.
As First Lady, restoring the White House and saving Lafayette Square were not the only preservation issues that would prepare Jackie for the Grand Central battle. The other was quite personal and involved the future of her girlhood home: Merrywood. Her mother and stepfather were contemplating the unthinkable—selling the place to a developer who would build apartment towers on the site overlooking the Potomac.
Hughdie and Janet Auchincloss had a hard choice to make. Sell Merrywood, the McLean, Virginia, estate where they had been spending winters since their wedding in 1942, or continue to let the property drain them financially. The place was huge, a two-story Georgian mansion, with thirteen bedrooms, ten bathrooms, a four-car garage with another five bedrooms above that, a tenant house, and a five-room gardener’s cottage.70 Despite its size, Jackie and her family no longer spent time there. Jack was president and Jackie was busy sketching the layout of a country estate they would build on a mountaintop in nearby Atoka, Virginia; they would call it Wexford, after the county in Ireland where Kennedy’s ancestors came from, but the couple only used it twice before the assassination.71
A month before Jackie’s televised White House tour, Hughdie had sol
d an option on the Merrywood property to a local developer who wanted to build three brick luxury apartment towers as tall as seventeen stories—some higher than the Capitol—and two rows of townhouses on the Merrywood property, which was just down the road from the recently built CIA headquarters in Langley. The residence was to be turned into a private club and guesthouse. In order to move forward, the project, which could house as many as twelve hundred families and cost about $15 million, needed Fairfax County to approve a zoning change.
Merrywood in MacLean, Virginia, during the Auchincloss family’s ownership. (Origin unknown)
The residents of the powerful, leafy suburb—a wealthy bedroom community for spies, diplomats, and, of course, members of the Kennedy administration—were educated, motivated, and privileged. They had been voting for local officials who were against development and had been fighting apartments for some time when the Merrywood issue erupted. Almost immediately, citizens’ groups began drawing the sharp contrast between Jackie’s preservation efforts and what her mother and stepfather were threatening to do, highlighting the “incongruity” of the situation.72
Jackie was in a horrible bind. She loved Merrywood so much that she wrote home about it to her stepfather from Italy when she was younger: “I began to feel terribly homesick as I was driving—just like a dream—I started thinking of things like the path leading to the stable at Merrywood with the stones slipping as you ran up it.” Jack was fond of the place, too. The couple had spent their first summer as husband and wife on the property. Hughdie and Janet didn’t need so much space. But they did need the money the development deal would bring, not fully appreciating the political problems it would cause the Kennedys.
