Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Up on the podium, the white-haired bard faltered, however. The strong wind blew the pages of his preface, and the sun’s glare obscured the words. After reading three lines, he stopped, and despite Lyndon Johnson’s gallant effort to shield the podium with a top hat, Frost could not go on. Instead, he recited “The Gift Outright” from memory in a resonant voice. The symbolism of his appearance was important, and it was backed up by the presence of more than fifty other scholars and artists including Robert Lowell, John Hersey, W. H. Auden, and John Steinbeck. Kennedy had invited the cultural luminaries at the suggestion of Washingtonian Kay Halle, and he was happily surprised by the stir caused by their inclusion. Combined with Jackie’s inchoate plans announced earlier by Tish Baldrige, the inaugural marked the first step in elevating the arts to new prominence in the Kennedy court.

  Jack Kennedy took only sixteen minutes to read his address of 1,355 words. He spoke firmly, compared to the day a year earlier when “with shaking hands and in a voice that quavered” he announced his intention to seek the presidency. As he had hoped, his ideas caught the nation’s imagination. The New York Times drew a comparison with King Henry V’s summons to his troops before Agincourt, which was one of Kennedy’s favorite passages of Shakespeare. The newspaper’s chief columnist, James “Scotty” Reston, pronounced the speech “remarkable . . . a revival of the beauty of the English language.” Jackie was rhapsodic, calling it “so pure and beautiful and soaring that I knew I was hearing something great.” She predicted it would “go down in history as one of the most moving speeches ever uttered—with Pericles’ funeral oration and the Gettysburg address.” Harry Truman was more pithy but no less impressed: “It was short, to the point, and in language anyone can understand. Even I could understand it—and therefore the people can.”

  Jack didn’t kiss Jackie on the podium, as she had watched Dwight Eisenhower buss Mamie’s right cheek eight years earlier. In a series of feature stories for the Times-Herald, Jackie had written about the Eisenhower inaugural with an eye for droll detail, noting that “Mrs. Truman sat stolidly with her gaze glued to the blimp overhead,” that the special seats in the presidential box were “old kitchen chairs” covered in gilt paint, and that a workman said Mrs. Eisenhower would be “a prisoner of the Secret Service for the next four years.”

  TV viewers wrote letters protesting the apparent slight by JFK, not knowing the First Couple’s aversion to showing their affection in public. “I was so proud of Jack,” Jackie later told Molly Thayer. “But I could scarcely embrace him in front of all those people, so I remember I just put my hand on his cheek and said, ‘Jack, you were so wonderful!’ And he was smiling in the most touching and most vulnerable way. He looked so happy.”

  Three District of Columbia transit buses bearing signs saying “KENNEDY FAMILY” whisked the clan around town, while the First Couple, along with Bobby and Ethel, rode in the inaugural parade. The most poignant moment occurred when Jack and Jackie’s bubbletop limousine approached the reviewing stand in front of the White House. Joe Kennedy stood and doffed his top hat in a crisp salute to the new president, and Jack quickly returned the gesture. “It was an extraordinary moment,” recalled Eunice. “Father had never stood up for any of us before. He was always proud of us, but he was always the authority we stood up for.” In his exuberance, Joe Kennedy then similarly honored Bobby, the other members of the cabinet, and finally Harry Truman.

  Also significant was the presence of the 11th Duke of Devonshire and his wife, Deborah (“Debo”), the youngest of the famous Mitford sisters—“the first members of British nobility to attend an American President’s inauguration,” according to Doris Kearns Goodwin. They served as vivid reminders of the lost Kennedy children. Kathleen Kennedy had married the duke’s brother Billy, the Marquess of Hartington, in May 1944. Kathleen’s choice of a Protestant, albeit an aristocratic one, had tormented her mother (“a blow to the family prestige,” Rose had called it), although Joe had accepted it with barely disguised pride.

  Three months later, Joe Jr. died when the plane he was piloting exploded over the English Channel on a mission to destroy the concrete bunkers hiding Hitler’s deadly V-1 rockets. The following month, Billy Hartington was cut down by a sniper’s bullet in Belgium. Kathleen chose to continue living in England, and in 1948 she too was killed in a plane crash over mountains in southern France. She was buried in her adopted homeland, at Chatsworth, the vast estate of the Devonshires, who remained close to the Kennedy family. On inauguration day, they had a privileged position in the reviewing stand, right next to the President.

  JFK could scarcely contain his excitement as he watched the parade and greeted guests escorted by aides to his front-row seat. Forty marching bands provided the day’s pageantry, along with the entire corps of the Naval Academy and West Point. Reflecting the intermingled themes of the inaugural address, the parade slogan promised “World Peace through New Frontiers” (one float had a blue and white replica of the United Nations building), even as army tanks, A-4D and F-4H navy jets, and an array of missiles (Pershing, Lacrosse, Nike Hercules and Nike Zeus) glided by in a mirror image of Red Square parades. Jack Kennedy did a double take when a cowboy on a buffalo (looking, as one observer put it, “like a beatnik on an avant-garde horse”) headed for the reviewing stand at full gallop, paused to chat, then thundered away.

  As the parade wound down and the sky darkened, the new president spotted a float carrying an eighty-foot-long PT boat painted to simulate PT-109, the craft he made famous with a daring rescue during World War II. His heroism had resulted from a tragic accident on a “pitch black night” in the Pacific when the wooden patrol boat he commanded was rammed by a 2,000-ton Japanese destroyer steaming at top speed out of the gloom. Despite the force of the collision and the engulfing fireball, eleven of the thirteen men survived and swam to an island, with Kennedy pulling a badly burned crew member in his wake. They were marooned forty miles behind enemy lines for four days as Kennedy sought help by swimming to nearby islands. He finally succeeded after encountering two natives working for the Allies who suggested he carve a message into a coconut that they could carry to their superiors.

  Kennedy’s dramatic exploits made instant headlines and inspired an acclaimed article by John Hersey in The New Yorker. The story of Kennedy’s bravery helped define his political persona and became a crucial element in his ascent to the presidency. Lost in the myth was the fact that if Kennedy and his crew had been equipped with radar or had been more vigilant, the collision might have been avoided. For a commander, it was an embarrassing incident. Inga Arvad recounted that JFK didn’t know whether the navy would “give him a medal or throw him out.” But no one could deny Kennedy’s courage, leadership, determination, and resourcefulness in the aftermath. The famous coconut, encased in plastic, would soon rest on his Oval Office desk, a reminder of his valor to all his visitors.

  When the PT boat display passed, Kennedy waved excitedly to his loyal crewmen and summoned his two closest friends from navy days down from the rear of the reviewing stand to join him in the front row. Each of those fellow officers, Red Fay and Jim Reed, reflected an aspect of Kennedy’s personality.

  Fay bristled with energy, always ready with the wisecrack. He came from a West Coast version of JFK’s Irish Catholic family: six children dominated by a hard-driving Republican businessman—the politically conservative owner of a construction company—whom Fay referred to as “The Battler” and Kennedy called “the great industrialist.” A graduate of Stanford, Fay was one year younger than JFK.

  Fay inhabited Kennedy’s world purely for pleasure and amusement. “Kennedy liked people who were brash, as long as they were not rude,” said journalist Rowland Evans, a close friend of Fay. “He loved the banter, and Red Fay had that.” Fay found Kennedy’s sense of fun irresistible. “His laugh kind of exploded,” said Fay. “It was not loud, but it was so contagious it was difficult to stop.”

  Shortly after his election, Kennedy had offered Fay a jo
b as under secretary of the navy. But following an interview with Robert McNamara, whom Fay regarded as a “coldly serious man,” the new defense secretary vetoed the proposal. Despite an agreement to give complete appointment power to McNamara, Kennedy overruled his decision, and Fay got the job. Kennedy knew McNamara was right. Fay lacked the necessary experience to be the second-ranking civilian in the navy; he had supervised around a hundred employees at the family firm and the navy employed more than one million.

  But Kennedy wanted Fay in Washington as a boon companion, and Fay was Bobby Kennedy’s friend as well. “It was the only appointment,” recalled Roswell Gilpatric, McNamara’s top deputy, that was “really forced. . . . We just designed the administration of the department around Fay . . . [who] was sort of carved out of the action.” Fay’s Republican label similarly suited Kennedy because, Fay recalled, “it was good to show the President was open to different points of view.” Not incidentally, Kennedy also expected Fay to feed him intelligence. “You’re my pal,” he told Fay, asking him to “keep me informed” about people in the Pentagon.

  Kennedy likewise enlisted Jim Reed for his administration, appointing him first as one of Bobby’s deputies, then as an assistant secretary of the Treasury. Reed was a Harvard-educated lawyer with a busy practice in Springfield, Massachusetts. He had helped Kennedy in all his campaigns, and for several years had joined Kennedy as an investor in the Narragansett Times, a Rhode Island newspaper. But Kennedy’s friendship with Reed wasn’t an obvious match.

  Reed was soft-spoken, unassuming, and from a modest background. “Jack had so many people, maybe he looked to Jim for normalcy,” said Reed’s wife, Jewel. Reed’s family had deep roots in western Massachusetts. During the Depression, his mother had kept the family afloat by working as a housekeeper. Reed was an exceptional athlete, which earned him a scholarship at Deerfield, Choate’s chief rival. There and later at Amherst, he was a football, baseball, and basketball star, attracting offers to play with the Boston Red Sox and New York Giants.

  JFK admired Reed’s athleticism, but their real affinity was a love of history and poetry. “We had enormous rapport,” said Reed. “Jack Kennedy saw himself as a hero figure, but in a modest way.” Reed was a Republican, a “Yankee Protestant, poised to dislike Jack Kennedy,” he said. “Instead I was totally taken in by him.” Reed was captivated by Kennedy’s unexpected humility, a “willingness to listen” that gave Reed confidence. “If someone like Jack thought I was okay,” said Reed, “I couldn’t be so bad. I could go toe to toe with him in intellectual discussion.” Reed felt the power of Kennedy’s charm, although JFK “was never assertive, but rather quiet and a trifle shy, oddly enough.” Nor did Kennedy ever needle Reed as he did other friends. A student of Robert Burns, Reed described Kennedy’s ability to view himself with critical detachment by citing one of the poet’s famous lines: “Oh wad some power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!”

  Jackie left the inaugural parade at 3:27 in a state of exhaustion. After declaring, “I’m not leaving until the last man has passed!”, her husband stayed until 6:12, an hour after sunset. Keeping him company were the Johnsons, the Robert Kennedys, and the Dillons. Inside the White House, friends and family members thronged the state rooms for a chaotic “high tea” that featured stiff drinks for the chilled and weary. Eunice and Pat arrived arm in arm with Lem Billings, who had been traveling around with the Kennedy entourage. As they entered the front door, Lem remembered a scene from Gone with the Wind when Mammy and Prissy walked with Scarlett O’Hara into her new mansion. Imitating Prissy’s wide stare and baby voice, Billings exclaimed, “Lawzy, we sho’ is rich now!”

  The giddy mood continued throughout the afternoon. Lem and Eunice went to the Lincoln Bedroom and bounced on the massive bed with its eight-foot-high headboard carved with exotic birds and clusters of grapes. Downstairs, Teddy Kennedy, “who had drunk a little more than usual, was dancing crazily on a platform,” observed French ambassador Hervé Alphand.

  Jackie’s family, the Auchinclosses and the Bouviers, were behaving more decorously. The only absentee was Jackie’s sister, Lee, who had given birth prematurely in New York to a daughter the previous August; after months of serious illness, the baby had finally come home to London in late December. Jackie’s mother and stepfather, Janet and Hugh Auchincloss, were included in the various parties and luncheons but remained virtually invisible compared to the energetic Kennedys—which suited Janet’s sense of WASP propriety. “Janet never pushed herself in any way,” said her friend Jane Ridgeway. “She never sought the limelight.”

  The Washington of Janet Lee Auchincloss was the haven of cave dwellers, what Bill Walton called “the guardians of tradition, revered social customs, and carefully manicured pedigrees.” Janet Auchincloss was an old-fashioned snob typical of her generation and class. The irony was that her own forebears were no more illustrious than the Kennedys. Her Irish Catholic grandparents had fled the potato famine, but Janet feigned a link to the prestigious line of Robert E. Lee. Jackie was mostly amused by her mother’s pretensions. “She is just lace curtain Irish,” Jackie told her friend Jessie Wood. Publicly, however, Jackie chose to avoid her Irish ancestry as well. Yet Jackie was more of a free spirit than her mother, tending to judge others by talent or accomplishment rather than social bona fides.

  Janet’s father, James T. Lee, built a prosperous Manhattan real estate empire by pioneering the construction of luxurious apartment buildings. He was a tough-minded tyrant who practiced boxing every afternoon with a personal trainer. As a businessman, Joe Kennedy considered Lee “the smartest old rooster” and “the top of the pack.” But Jim and Margaret Lee were deeply estranged, and the tensions of their arid marriage made Janet insecure, despite having every material advantage. A governess taught her to speak fluent French, she learned to ride skillfully at the family’s summer home in Easthampton, and she received a correct education at Miss Spence’s School in Manhattan, although she dropped out of Barnard College after only two semesters.

  Janet had escaped her father’s domination by marrying John Vernou Bouvier III, the rakish Yale-educated stockbroker sixteen years her senior who was known as “Black Jack” for his carefully cultivated tan. The Bouviers had their own fictitious posture of nobility that Jackie promoted in her official biography with Molly Thayer. In fact, the first Bouvier in America had been a carpenter for Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte. Both Jackie and her mother were ardent Francophiles (Janet insisted that French be spoken at the dinner table), and the French connection offered Jackie a vivid romantic association with the eighteenth-century world she so admired.

  When Jackie’s mother married Hugh Auchincloss three years after divorcing Black Jack, she found financial security as well as prestige; she immediately became the chatelaine of Hammersmith Farm and Merrywood. “Uncle Hughdie” had been married previously to two unstable women, so Janet’s conventional domesticity suited him perfectly. Like Jack Bouvier, he was a stockbroker and Yale man, but he had the cushion of a Standard Oil inheritance as well as a law degree. He had also served in the Hoover and Coolidge administrations. Amiable and kindhearted, he financed Jackie’s many advantages and earned her loyalty with his sturdy dependability. If her father evoked Rhett Butler, “Unk” was Jackie’s Ashley Wilkes.

  Frequently disparaged as a dim-witted buffoon by his bitter stepson Gore Vidal, Auchincloss was actually a serious bibliophile, a nineteenth-century club man who took refuge in reading. It was in his library at Merrywood that Jackie steeped herself in stories of America’s founders, especially George Washington, whose “human qualities” she came to appreciate, according to her stepbrother Hugh D. (“Yusha”) Auchincloss III. She once told Yusha that he would “be famous” for loving Merrywood as his home “like Washington & Mount Vernon.” While her fondness for French history was more well known, her knowledge of Americana through her stepfather prepared her well for her role as First Lady.

  Jackie had notified the press that
because of her recuperation, she would “take short rest periods after each inauguration activity.” But she hadn’t anticipated the extent of her fatigue when she returned from the parade. She and Jack had been invited to dine at the home of George Wheeler, a friend of JFK’s from Choate, and his wife, Jane, who had been active in the Citizens for Kennedy group. But when Jackie tried to get dressed, “I couldn’t get out of bed,” she told Molly Thayer. “I just didn’t have one bit of strength left.” Dr. Janet Travell, JFK’s official White House physician, prescribed dinner in bed and a brown Dexedrine tablet to revive Jackie for the inaugural balls.

  JFK returned from the Wheelers’ at nine-thirty to collect Jackie. Wearing white tie and tails, he puffed on a cigar in the Red Room as he waited. Finally she arrived “breathlessly, in a gentle flurry,” and “stood in the doorway poised as if for flight.” She wore a slender white sheath that she had designed, with a shimmering strapless beaded bodice veiled with an overblouse of chiffon—once more intended to set her off from the big skirts that were traditional for inaugural balls.

  The Kennedys followed a royal progress from one ball to the next. Their elegance and charisma seemed to immobilize onlookers, who stared in admiration. As they were leaving the second of five balls, “I just crumpled,” Jackie recalled. “All my strength was finally gone, so I went home and Jack went on with the others.”