The Kennedys may have been Democrats, full of compassion for the poor and dispossessed, but the image of Jack and Jackie as king and queen surrounded by their court had occurred to many people familiar with the administration. The British political philosopher and formidable Oxford don Isaiah Berlin—a guest at several private White House dinners—saw the Kennedys as “Bonapartist,” finding parallels in Napoleon’s brothers who, like Robert F. Kennedy as attorney general and Edward M. Kennedy as U.S. senator, held responsible positions in the government. Berlin found further similarities in the aides who served their leader: “devoted, dedicated marshals who liked nothing better than to have their ears tweaked.” Kennedy’s “men with shining eyes,” Berlin observed, had a “great deal of energy and ambition” and were “marching forward in some very exciting and romantical fashion.” David Ormsby Gore, the British ambassador during the Kennedy administration and one of the President’s most intimate friends and advisers, likened the administration to a “Tudor Court.”
Richard Neustadt, then a professor of government at Columbia University, mused that the Kennedy “court life,” a cynosural arrangement last seen in the White House of Theodore Roosevelt, had the equivalent of “apartments at Versailles” and “latch keys for the weekends.” The columnist Stewart Alsop complained after one year of the Kennedy administration, “The place is lousy with courtiers and ladies in waiting—actual or would be.” As with court life in earlier centuries, the Kennedy entourage made a stately progress: from the White House to expensive homes in the Virginia hunt country, to Palm Beach, Hyannis Port, and Newport—all playgrounds for the rich and privileged.
“Jackie wanted to do Versailles in America,” said Oleg Cassini, her official dress designer and self-described “de facto courtier close to the king and queen.” “She said this many times,” Cassini added. “She had realized some very smart women encouraged a court throughout history.” In particular Jackie admired Madame de Maintenon, who presided over a legendary salon before marrying Louis XIV, and Madame de Récamier, the early nineteenth-century hostess famous for the wit and intelligence of her gatherings.
Jackie organized her life in the White House according to what interested her, handing off many of the ritual obligations to others and delegating the paperwork to subordinates. “My life here which I dreaded & which at first overwhelmed me—is now under control and the happiest time I have ever known—not for the position—but for the closeness of one’s family,” Jackie wrote to her friend William Walton in mid-1962. “The last thing I expected to find in the W. House.”
On any given day, President Kennedy would be managing what veteran Democratic adviser Clark Clifford called “the cockiest crowd I’d ever seen in the White House,” a group of West Wing aides that National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy likened to “the Harlem Globetrotters, passing forward, behind, sideways and underneath.” At another moment JFK might be swimming in the White House pool (heated to 90 degrees for his ailing back) with his trusted factotum Dave Powers and a couple of fetching West Wing secretaries, or having a tête-à-tête lunch (grilled cheese, cold beef, consommé) with Jackie, or clapping his hands three times to welcome his three-year-old daughter, Caroline, into the Oval Office.
Jackie, meanwhile, might be at the long table in the Treaty Room on the second floor of the White House, smoking her L&M filtered cigarettes and scribbling memos on foolscap, or composing a letter to French culture minister André Malraux, one of her mentors. Perhaps she would be bouncing on the canvas trampoline on the South Lawn to relieve stress, or curled up with Marcus Cheke’s The Cardinal de Bernis: A Biography, or ducking into the White House school in the third-floor solarium, where the squeals of children competed with the yelps of five dogs and the chirps of two parakeets: part of a menagerie that brought to mind Teddy Roosevelt’s days in the Executive Mansion.
In the evening Jack and Jackie would typically host a dinner for eight—a collection of close friends with an imported New York artist or writer as a “new face”—as Italian songs played softly on the Victrola. The conversation, invariably informal and candid, might touch on the queen of Greece (“nothing but a busy-body . . . seeming to save the world [but] basically, building herself up,” according to Jackie), the origin of the French ambassador’s pin-striped shirt (Pierre Cardin, not Jermyn Street in London), the character of Richard Nixon (“nice fellow in private but . . . he seems to have a split personality and he is very bad in public,” in Jack’s view), or JFK’s concerns about NATO (“Europe wants a free ride in its defense”).
The Kennedys gave memorable private dinner dances as well—a half dozen in less than three years—where waiters carried large trays filled with such exotic mixed drinks as the Cuba Libre, a lethal combination of rum, Coca-Cola, and lime juice. “They served the drinks in enormous tumblers,” recalled writer George Plimpton. “Everybody had too much to drink because they were excited.” State dinners set new standards for culinary excellence (with menus in French for the first time) and cultural entertainments featuring Shakespeare’s sonnets and Jerome Robbins’s ballets. “It was Irish, which made it fun,” wrote television correspondent Nancy Dickerson, “and blended with the spirit of Harvard and the patina of Jackie’s finishing schools, the mixture was intoxicating.”
Highbrow seminars brought in “great guns” to provoke “great thoughts” for a select group of friends and administration officials, in the irreverent view of Arthur Schlesinger’s wife, Marian. “It was rather self-conscious though harmless,” Marian said, “sort of like Voltaire at the court of Frederick the Great.” Guest lecturers included noted historian Elting Morison on Teddy Roosevelt (“Not so,” TR’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth periodically murmured in a stage whisper, a malicious glint in her eye) and philosopher A. J. Ayer on logical positivism (“But St. Thomas said,” Ethel Kennedy twice interjected before her husband barked, “Drop it Ethel, drop it”). The sober atmosphere collapsed entirely during Rachel Carson’s talk on “The Male Screw Worm” when Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon’s giggles caused the gathering to dissolve in laughter.
Such levity masked a more shadowy reality—a hedonism and moral relativism that anticipated the sexual revolution of the following decades. Behind the scenes, Kennedy engaged in private sexual escapades in the White House, Palm Beach, Malibu, Manhattan, and Palm Springs, activities that many in the Kennedy court heard as rumors, others refused to acknowledge, and a select few—primarily trusted White House aides Kenneth O’Donnell and Dave Powers, as well as inner-circle crony Charles “Chuck” Spalding—witnessed and sometimes abetted. Jackie knew what was going on, and confided as much to her sister, Lee Radziwill, several intimate friends, and even administration officials such as Adlai Stevenson. But publicly she stoically chose to ignore her husband’s infidelities, which gave her greater latitude in pursuing her own rarefied life of foxhunting and hobnobbing with jet set friends in Europe.
Some, like her friend Eve Fout in Virginia, saw occasional evidence of Jackie’s sadness and noticed that “she didn’t have the easiest marital situation.” Many assumed that Jackie simply shared the European aristocratic view that it was natural for husbands to stray. “All Kennedy men are like that,” she once told Ted Kennedy’s wife, Joan. “You can’t let it get to you because you shouldn’t take it personally.” Jackie adored her father and her father-in-law, both of whom had been openly unfaithful to their wives. “She had made a bargain with herself,” said her longtime friend Jessie Wood. “She discovered Jack was a real philanderer, but she decided to stick it out. I think she loved him.”
Because of their youth, beauty, and social pedigree, along with their pursuit of fun and intellectual stimulation, Jack and Jackie Kennedy attracted a glamorous coterie of friends and colleagues—what Harold Macmillan characterized as the “smart life” (international socialites and Hollywood stars), “the highbrow life” (pundits and professors), and the “political life” (chosen aides and cabinet officers). Perhaps as never before, Wash
ington was sharply divided between the “ins” and the “outs.” Washington society columnist Betty Beale, who observed from outside the circle, commented that Washingtonians invited to private parties at the Kennedy White House “adopted a comical air of smugness.”
Within the court, “very few really had much in common with each other,” said newspaperman Charles Bartlett, a Kennedy intimate. Some were accomplished athletes, others hopelessly uncoordinated. The socially prominent carried equal weight with those from modest backgrounds; neither Jack nor Jackie could be accused of snobbery.
Only two personal friends of the first Catholic president shared his religion, along with three of his close aides. A remarkable number in the inner circle—five personal friends and three members of the administration—were Republicans, not to mention Jackie Kennedy’s entire family, including her half sister Nina Steers, who wrote anti-Kennedy articles for a Tennessee newspaper during the 1960 campaign.
Several Kennedy insiders were thought to be homosexual, although only one, the columnist Joseph Alsop, ever acknowledged it. Despite the macho image of the Kennedy administration, JFK was comfortable with homosexuals, perhaps, some friends believed, because he understood the tensions of having a secret life.
Most members of the Kennedy court were stars in their fields, lending what Kennedy biographer William Manchester called “an elegant, mandarin tone.” They tended to be “cheerful, amusing, energetic, informed and informal,” observed Kennedy’s chief domestic aide Theodore Sorensen. Nearly everyone in the Kennedy court was attractive—and even those of lesser looks, such as the pockmarked artist William Walton, were clever and debonair.
Brainpower and a talent to amuse were the most highly valued traits. JFK “enjoyed . . . almost anyone from whom he could learn . . . communicating on the level of the Bundy brothers and the Cassini brothers,” wrote Sorensen. Both Jack and Jackie abhorred the mundane. JFK said he “hated the suburbia-type existence” with its endless cocktail parties. Even as a teenager Jackie had confided to her sister a distaste for country club women who could converse only about monograms on guest towels and the progress of their children’s teeth.
JFK expected “real ping pong in the communication,” in the words of White House aide Fred Holborn. Katharine Graham, then the mousy wife of the Washington Post’s glamorous president and publisher, confessed that her “terror” of boring JFK “paralyzed and silenced” her. When Suzanne Roosevelt, the wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., hosted Jack and Jackie for dinner, she caught the President’s attention by quoting Lincoln. “My God, I said something that interested him,” she recalled thinking at the time.
Kennedy “hated dimness,” said Isaiah Berlin. “Anybody who was dim, no matter how virtuous, how wise, how . . . noble . . . [was] no good to him.” Nor was anyone with less than one hundred percent loyalty. “The Kennedys were pretty tough eggs,” said Marian Schlesinger. “Either you were in or you were out. . . . I think the Kennedys really turned people into courtiers. . . . They manipulated and used people in a rough way.”
Jack and Jackie Kennedy would quite literally command their courtiers to sing and dance. Paul “Red” Fay, who became friendly with JFK during World War II, routinely performed “Hooray for Hollywood,” yelling out the lines as JFK doubled over with laughter. Oleg Cassini would launch into his “Chaplin walk” or the latest dance step from New York nightclubs. “Kennedy knew he was a potentate, and at a dinner for 150 he would point a finger at you and say, ‘Talk,’” said Cassini. “Was I a performing seal? Yes, and it was a slightly naughty thing. He did it to a lot of people. In Palm Beach after a heavy lunch he told everyone to do pushups and everyone did, trying to impress him.”
JFK had “to an exceptional degree, the gift of friendship,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger. The foundations of his friendship were warmth, solicitude, and finely balanced flattery. Jack Kennedy compartmentalized his relationships, much as Franklin D. Roosevelt did. Kennedy’s “friends came in layers . . . and each layer considered itself closest to the center. But Kennedy kept the layers apart and included and baffled them all,” Schlesinger wrote. The President’s intimates “each had a certain role we were cast into whether we knew it or not,” said James Reed, a friend of Kennedy’s since World War II. Kennedy even kept Theodore Sorensen, his intellectual “alter ego,” off balance. “That man [Sorensen] never knows from one week to the next where he stands,” said White House aide Ralph Dungan in mid-1963.
It seemed that Kennedy held something out on everyone. “No one—no single aide, friend or member of his family—knew all his thoughts or actions on any single subject,” observed Sorensen. Kennedy didn’t talk about women with some of his friends, but he did with others—usually those with whom he wouldn’t discuss intellectual matters. His closest political operatives were privy to Kennedy’s ruthlessness, what Schlesinger called the “determined, unrelenting and profane” part of his personality that would have shocked his purely social friends. Look magazine reporter Laura Bergquist considered him “prismatic . . . He had many funny facets.”
Kennedy disliked being alone, so he constantly surrounded himself with friends and family—a result, some friends thought, of growing up with eight siblings in a household that resembled a bustling hotel. But such relentless fellowship came at the cost of true intimacy, a distance that may have suited JFK. One or two people could claim special insight into his feelings, but most related to him superficially. “You’d never bleed in his presence nor would he in yours,” said Bill Walton. “I’m not going to run around telling him when I’m hurt about something and God knows he’s not going to tell me.”
A close association with Jack Kennedy had clear rules. Charley Bartlett noticed that JFK “wasn’t a cozy friend . . . somebody that you’d sort of slop around with on a Sunday. It was always . . . you’d arrange to take a walk . . . or do something that had been laid down.” Chuck Spalding always knew that his time with Kennedy had limits: “He didn’t like to be with the same people for forty-eight hours, if that long.” Everyone in Kennedy’s circle made himself available for a last-minute invitation, as well as phone calls at any hour, day and night.
Writing to his superiors in London, David Ormsby Gore noted that Kennedy created “his own private information network” that he used “to cross check about individuals and events.” Instead of being put off, Kennedy’s friends felt grateful to be on the receiving end of what James Reed called Kennedy’s “consistent patter of asking people what they thought.”
Jack Kennedy was most comfortable in the company of men. In this he was like his father, who once wrote to a friend, “Women never have any effect on our lives—we’re men’s men!” But several women were important members of the Kennedy court. Jack Kennedy had grown up with lively sisters, who combined girlishness and sophistication and who regarded men as authority figures. JFK viewed women primarily as sexual objects to be conquered; he was not much interested in falling in love, sharing feelings, or gratifying his partners.
But while he was a philanderer, Jack Kennedy was not a misogynist. He kept Jackie in what she herself called his “happiness compartment.” “Whatever his waywardness may have been, even if there was no end of that,” said Arthur Schlesinger, “he was very pleased and proud to be married to Jackie.” Kennedy was fascinated by women—as lovers, amusers, comforters, pals, helpmeets of various sorts. He was intrigued by what women wore, how they looked, how they thought.
He had not been raised (nor did the times encourage him) to take women seriously enough to have them as advisers in his administration. “It drove him wild,” his friend Bill Walton said, if a woman tried to “bend his ear.” But he gradually learned to appreciate the quality of a woman’s mind through exposure to Jackie’s originality and intelligence, along with the ideas of a few women journalists, notably forty-six-year-old Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth, who wrote for The Economist. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy respected Ward’s “capacity to state problems in a probing an
d persuasive way.” Marian Schlesinger noticed other aspects of her appeal: “She was an intellectual, good-looking woman who dressed well and was a great expert who intrigued all those guys.”
Jackie’s own circle was smaller than her husband’s. “I don’t think she found it relaxing the way he did to have a lot of people around,” said her sister, Lee. On her private phone line at the White House, “she did keep in touch with a handful of pals,” recalled Tish Baldrige, Jackie’s White House social secretary, “but not in long drawn-out conversations.”
It has often been said—usually by women who had been rebuffed by her—that Jackie had little use for women and focused only on men. “She would cozy up to men with wine and cigarettes,” said Pat Hass, who helped Jackie start the White House school. Jackie did find men more interesting than women—particularly during the White House days when there were so many bright, powerful, and appealing men around. (Before her marriage to JFK she had revealed to newspaperman John White her ambition to be “the confidante of an important man.”) Most women of that era led confined lives that simply didn’t appeal to Jackie. “She enjoyed the thoughts that were in men’s minds,” said Robert McNamara, JFK’s secretary of defense.
Jackie Kennedy prized loyalty as much as her husband—especially in the White House, where she was reluctant to branch beyond trusted friendships forged early in her life. Since her childhood, she had selected her friends carefully, with a preference for offbeat characters. Most of the women she knew well had brains as well as style, humor, and imagination. “She didn’t like empty-headed women who talked about manicures,” said her longtime friend Solange Batsell Herter. Nor did Jackie care for any woman who was what she called a “pushy creature” or self-promoter. “She liked women who were feminine and who weren’t just after what tough men were after,” said Herter.
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