Bartlett, however, liked to speculate, in later years, on what Jack’s life would have been like had he chosen another sort of wife. “There was this beautiful girl up in Boston. Her name was K. K. Hannon. Her father was a policeman. She was gorgeous. If Jack had married her, she could have dealt with him, I think. She was Irish and tough and damned good-looking. But, no, he had to marry up.”
Jackie, whose father’s infidelities had helped destroy his marriage, recognized she was marrying a husband of similar habits. “Well, she knew what she was getting into when she married him,” Bartlett said. “She was in love with Jack, and he had this terrible habit of going out with these other girls.” As Bartlett figured it, his friend’s intended bride simply made a vow that she’d “take it all on, and she did.”
Jack’s concern was more on the politics of his decision. “I gave everything a good deal of thought,” he announced in a letter to Red Fay out in San Francisco. “So I am getting married this fall. This means the end of a promising political career, as it has been based up to now almost completely on the old sex appeal. Let me know the general reaction to this in the Bay area.”
In fact, with an eye to the likely fallout from the coming change in his marital status, he managed to keep secret his engagement until after the Saturday Evening Post had run a long-planned feature headlined “Jack Kennedy: The Senate’s Gay Young Bachelor.” Later, without telling his fiancée, he invited a Life photographer along on a sailing trip that she’d supposed would be time alone for them.
To reap the political benefit of their boss’s engagement, O’Donnell, together with O’Brien, began to plan a large event for all the “Kennedy Secretaries” from the previous year. To get the reluctant Jack to agree, they told him, “They haven’t seen you since the election and they all want to give you a gift and so forth,” O’Donnell recalled his pitch to the bridegroom. It was a classic, canny Kennedy event, a party to honor the engaged couple for which the guests paid admission and were more invested in their hero for having done so. “For the time and the place, it wasn’t cheap. But the faithful were willing to shell out ten dollars for a chance to see the senator they’d helped elect and to meet his beautiful fiancée. They felt included, even ‘related.’ “
O’Donnell described the celebration he staged: “They paid for their meal, paid for their drinks, and they gave the senator and Jackie a gift. One of the few organizations in the history of mankind that were paying him instead of him paying them, but we knew he wouldn’t pay for it, so we had to, or he wouldn’t come—since he didn’t want to, anyway. Though, once they were there, he had a great time.”
The wedding party convened the weekend of September 12, 1953, in Newport, Rhode Island, where Jackie’s remarried mother, now Mrs. Hugh Auchincloss, lived at Hammersmith Farm. The groomsmen included Lem from Choate, Torby from Harvard, and Red Fay from the navy, plus Chuck Spalding, Charlie Bartlett, and George Smathers. The ceremony was held at St. Mary’s, a nineteenth-century church in the Gothic style. Society pages around the country pronounced it the “wedding of the year.”
When Fay showed up, the ever-competitive Jack asked him as soon as the two men were alone what he thought of Jackie. “I said, ‘God, she’s a fantastic-looking woman.’ And then I added, ‘If you ever get a little hard of hearing, you’re going to have a little trouble picking up all the transmission.’ “ Jack laughed, loving his navy pal’s reaction to the classic Jackie whisper.
Jack was about to embark on a new life, yet there remained evidence that he himself, the onetime Mucker ringleader, had changed little over all those years. Fay noticed the way he enjoyed the bit of culture clash that occurred between a few of his cronies and the Newporters. “Almost across the street from Hammersmith Farm were the green fairways of the Newport Country Club,” he said, “where I’d often played during the war. The gentry of Newport had opened up their club for men in uniform, but with the end of the war the doors had shut tight again.”
Somehow, Fay and Kennedy’s aide John Galvin—“looking more Irish than Paddy’s Pig”—got themselves onto the course to play a round. At this point Fay hadn’t realized that the relaxed wartime regulations were no longer in force. The club had returned to its firm rule that all nonmembers must be accompanied by a club member. “I hope you two enjoyed your game of golf,” Jack teased them, “because as a result of it there was almost a total breakdown of relations between the mother of the bride and her dashing prospective son-in-law. I’m afraid that they feel that their worst fears are being realized. The invasion by the Irish Catholic hordes into one of the last strongholds of America’s socially elite is being led by two chunky red-haired friends of the groom.”
Still, the temporary vibe of spontaneous, unpredictable fun was welcomed by at least a few Newporters. Fay recalls a comment made by the lifeguard at a nearby beach where the Kennedy guests were swimming and playing touch football. “I want to tell you,” the young man said, “this is the first time this place has had any life in it since I’ve been here.”
The wedding weekend was not proceeding without discord. Jack had asked Red to be the master of ceremonies at the bachelor dinner. Eventually, this favoritism seemed to cause resentment among his fellow ushers, especially as the evening wore on and more alcohol was imbibed. “Torby Macdonald stood up at the other end of the table, took his water glass, and hurled it the length of the table; and it hit me on the chest. Then it fell to the table and shattered. Since I’d had a few drinks, the natural response was to start down the table after him. Luckily for me—because I’m sure Torby would have taken me apart—Jim Reed and the president, then senator, grabbed me and the thing was averted.”
Also in attendance at the wedding and the dinner were Ken O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien. As the former describes it, “There were only a few political people invited, and we stayed together and talked politics. I met some of the gentlemen for the first time, like Spalding. I’d known Lem through Bobby. I met Smathers for the first time. And Charlie Bartlett. But we didn’t talk to them much. The Boston political guys sat with the other Boston political guys and drank with the Boston political guys, and we mostly talked politics and what the future might be for the senator.”
Lem Billings, Jack’s oldest friend, felt the need to have a personal heart-to-heart with the bride. “She was terribly young, and I thought it would be best if she were prepared for any problems. So I told her that night that I thought she ought to realize Jack was thirty-six years old, had been around an awful lot, had known many, many girls—it sounds like an awfully disloyal friend saying these things—and that she was going to have to be very understanding at the beginning. I said he had never really settled down with one girl before, and that a man of thirty-six is very difficult to live with. She was quite understanding about it and seemed to accept everything I said.”
Rather amazingly, Lem then reported this exchange to Jack. “Of course, later I told him everything I’d said to her—and he was pleased because he felt it would make her better understand him.”
Chuck Spalding had his own telling memory of the weekend. To him, it was as if his friend were actually two people at his own wedding—one being the groom, and the other a grand observer of the entire event, watching it as if from afar, the way an outsider might see it. To Spalding, this other Jack was totally detached from what was happening, this lifetime pairing of him with another.
On the wedding weekend, one thing is sure, which is that the newlywed Jack Kennedy was clearly thinking beyond the imaginings of the ordinary groom. Sailing in the waters off Hammersmith Farm, he gazed at his wife’s family’s cove on Narragansett Bay and said to Bartlett, “This would be a helluva place to sail in the presidential yacht.”
By the time the honeymooning couple arrived in San Francisco—they’d gone first to Acapulco and then on to San Ysidro Ranch in the hills above Santa Barbara—the reality of the union between the thirty-six-year-old Jack Kennedy and twenty-four-year-old Jackie Bouvier was asserting its
elf. Here’s Red Fay’s account of hosting the two near the end of their wedding journey: “When Jack and Jacqueline came to the West Coast on their honeymoon, the pressures of public life too often intruded on the kind of honeymoon any young bride anticipates. For example, on their last day on the West Coast, Jack and I went to a pro football game. I’m sure this didn’t seem a particularly unusual arrangement for Jack.”
Jack Kennedy continually craved such fresh company. He liked the rush of excitement that came with it. Perhaps that enjoyment was rooted in those times in his youth when he’d been confined to bed. Bored easily by sameness, he preferred to keep moving, wanted the movie to stay exciting, liked people to be forever fascinating—and he wanted never to be alone, or too long with the same person.
The trouble was, as at least one friend saw it, those around him let him get away with it. In Charlie Bartlett’s words, “they spoiled him. . . . They spoiled the hell out of Jack. . . . I wish they hadn’t, actually.” People came to understand that, attractive as he was, Jack could be coldly self-indulgent. Yet his company was magnetic and his joy in life was irresistible.
Jack and Jackie were, both of them, like characters out of Fitzgerald, two people with old-world aspirations, but like most Americans, self-inventing. Lem Billings, I think, had it right when he said: “He saw her as a kindred spirit . . . he understood the two of them were alike. They had both taken circumstances that weren’t the best in the world when they were younger and . . . learned to make themselves up as they went along. Even the names, Jack and Jackie: two halves of a single whole. They were both actors, and I think they appreciated each other’s performances. It was unbelievable to watch them work a party. Both of them had the ability to make you feel that there was no place on earth you’d rather be than sitting there in intimate conversation with them.”
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Dumbarton Oaks
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McCarthy & Cohn
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Ted Reardon
CHAPTER EIGHT
SURVIVAL
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
—Ernest Hemingway
Jack Kennedy had faced death often in his life. He’d spent much of his teenage years with doctors examining him, saying what an “interesting” case he presented. Leukemia, even, was mentioned. He never did manage to escape the knot he felt in his stomach, a chronic reminder of the frequent invalidism he’d lived with in youth and which now followed him into adulthood. When the Japanese destroyer cut through PT 109, barely missing him, the pounding he took said, This is what it feels like to die. Once home, the surgery performed on his back left him with a pain he was forced to live with. In London, there was the diagnosis of Addison’s.
In 1954, Jack had a choice to make. He could play it one way, living a diminished life that would lead, very likely, to worse. Or he could risk it all—just as he’d done when he left Plum Pudding Island and swam out into that channel in hope of rescue. He was thirty-seven years old and staring at a future that promised a different sort of torture than he might have suffered at the hands of the Japanese. His steadily worsening back promised a return to the sickbed he’d endured as a boy. This time, however, his dreamed-of future would no longer be looming before him, but, rather, drifting forever into the past.
He would, of course, throw everything he had on the table. Rather than accept a lessened existence, he chose to bet his life on the operating room.
The year began with him executing a masterstroke. As a freshman congressman, he’d shown his independence by withholding his signature from the sleazy Curley petition. Now, in his second year in the Senate, Kennedy made an even bolder move, separating himself from the ranks of his fellow New Englanders. He voted for the creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway, connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes. This meant backing a public works project that could mean the loss of Boston Harbor’s importance as a major shipping port.
That 1954 January vote made him an unpopular figure in Massachusetts. It wasn’t hard to understand why. The carving out of a direct route from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes could be seen in New England only in terms of its economic threat to the region. The Northeast was already in decline, and those factories engaged in shoemaking and in textiles, especially, were moving to the non-unionized, cheap-labor South. If ships could find their way to the Midwest without docking at Boston Harbor, huge numbers of jobs would be lost. The men and families who relied on those jobs—the townies of Charlestown and other harbor areas—wondered aloud why their young Irish representative in Washington wasn’t now safeguarding them.
“The story circulated around the state,” said Ken O’Donnell, who was friendly with many longshoremen, “that the Seaway was being built to take care of his father’s Merchandise Mart . . . that he was caught at last, paying off Joe Kennedy for all the money he spent on the election.”
In 1945 Joseph P. Kennedy had purchased the Merchandise Mart, the giant Chicago landmark and, at the time, the largest building in the world. Who stood to gain more from the opening of a direct shipping lane to the Atlantic than the man reaping the profits from this giant center for retailers and wholesalers situated there near Lake Michigan?
Tip O’Neill saw a grander political motive in Kennedy’s vote. He spotted it as the first clear signal that Jack Kennedy’s horizons stretched well beyond the job he now held. “I knew Jack was serious about running for president back in 1954, when he mentioned that he intended to vote for the St. Lawrence Seaway project. The whole Northeast delegation was opposed to that bill, because once you opened the Seaway, you killed the port of Boston, which was the closest port to Europe. The Boston papers were against it, and so were the merchant marines and the longshoremen. But Jack wanted to show that he wasn’t parochial, and that he had a truly national perspective. Although he acknowledged that the Seaway would hurt Boston, he supported it because the project would benefit the country as a whole.”
The burst of vitriol directed at him spurred his historical curiosity. “After he had been in the Senate for less than a year,” Sorensen would write in his late-in-life memoirs, “JFK called me into his office and said he wanted my help researching and writing a magazine article on the history of senatorial courage.”
Kennedy had come upon accounts of the heat John Quincy Adams—later the country’s sixth president—had taken not quite a century and a half earlier for a transgression similar to his own. As a Massachusetts senator, Adams had voted against the economic interests of New England when he supported President Jefferson’s embargo on Great Britain because of its attacks on American ships. As a result, he lost his Senate seat. Eighteen years later, though, Adams entered the White House.
Kennedy was another New Englander with wide ambitions. Still a Cold Warrior, he maintained his belief that the global struggle against Communism must remain his country’s prime concern. “If we do not stand firm amid the conflicting tides of neutralism, resignation, isolation, and indifference, then all will be lost, and one by one the free countries of the earth will fall until finally the direct assault will begin on the great citadel—the United States,” he would declare in a 1956 commencement speech at Boston College. He had only contempt for those men and women—and this included fellow Democrats—who refused to regard the fight against Communism as the essential struggle of the times.
Yet he worried how the struggle was being waged. A stark example was the desperate French fight in Indochina. Weakened by its humiliation in World War II, France was fighting to regain its international stature, to hold on to its colonial empire. Its conflict with the popular Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, had become a grinding war of attrition. Many on the American right, Vice President Richard Nixon included, wanted to go to the aid of the French. Communism, they felt, must be resisted on every square inch of global real estate.
When the North Vietnamese forces, the Viet Minh, surrounded the French army at Dien Bien Phu in ’54, Nixon grew more hawkish
still, telling news editors he supported sending “American boys” to replace them. He then backed a secret plan, code-named “Operation Vulture,” to drop atom bombs on the Viet Minh. He, other Republicans, and some Democrats like Jack Kennedy had blamed President Truman for “losing” China by not giving sufficient aid to the anti-Communist Chiang Kai-shek. The Eisenhower administration could not afford to lose Indochina.
Despite his own anti-Communism, Jack Kennedy resisted falling into line. For the first time, he broke with the Eurocentric view of the Cold War. He also challenged the Republicans’ position that the United States could defend itself worldwide on the basis of its nuclear supremacy alone. We could not intimidate an adversary such as Ho Chi Minh with the threat of dropping a hydrogen bomb in the jungles of Indochina. It would not be credible.
The argument he was using was the same one he’d employed to justify Britain’s failure to confront Hitler at Munich: the capability to fight such a war was not in place. “To pour money, material and men into the jungles of Indo-China without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and self-destructive. I am, frankly, of the belief that no amount of military assistance in Indo-China can conquer an enemy that is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.”
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