Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  In Kennedy’s restless enthusiasm, he was unable to quit when the last ball ended at 2 a.m. His next activity was a nightcap at the home of Joe Alsop at 2720 Dumbarton Avenue in Georgetown. Earlier in the week, Alsop had hatched the idea for a post-ball party with Manhattan hostess Florence Pritchett Smith and Afdera Fonda, the former wife of Henry Fonda. “If the lights are on in my house, there will be champagne to be drunk,” Alsop had told the women, who spread the word.

  Flo Pritchett had been a girlfriend of JFK during the postwar years and remained his good friend. “Over a long period of time, it was probably the closest relationship with a woman I know of,” said Chuck Spalding’s wife, Betty. After a humble upbringing in Ridgewood, New Jersey, Flo had become an expert in what her friend Robin Chandler Duke called “the fascinating people of New York—movie stars and people in social life.”

  Brown-eyed and slender, Flo had been a model, a clothing designer for Bergdorf Goodman, a fashion editor for William Randolph Hearst Jr.’s New York Journal-American, and a host of Leave It to the Girls, a popular radio show featuring a half dozen women trading witticisms. By the time of the inaugural, Flo was forty years old and married to a man nearly two decades older, Earl E.T. Smith, a wealthy and solidly Republican Wall Street banker from Newport. He had known Jackie since her childhood and was friendly with the Kennedys in Palm Beach. From 1957 until Fidel Castro’s overthrow of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, Earl had been Eisenhower’s ambassador to Cuba.

  Kennedy was captivated by Flo’s effervescent personality and an endless supply of gossip. She had closely studied men and their needs, and her views struck a chord with JFK: “Man is by nature a polygamous creature,” she once wrote, “a sensualist, an adventurer. . . . He dreams of a life in which a woman dedicates her time to stimulating his senses.” Although she had been “very keen” on JFK, according to Robin Duke, their relationship had been more companionable than romantic. She was one of the few women who made him laugh; on her twenty-seventh birthday she had scribbled in JFK’s appointment calendar: “Send Diamonds!”

  Flo grew close to JFK’s sisters Pat and Eunice, and befriended Jackie as well. Jackie was the only person outside the Smith family to attend Earl’s swearing-in as ambassador to Cuba. When Flo asked for ideas on literary classics to read in Havana, Jackie traveled to Manhattan to buy and ship 150 volumes that Flo proclaimed “the best collection of English literature of anyone I know—outside of Jackie herself.”

  As he was leaving the Statler Hilton in his limousine, Kennedy spotted Red Fay, who was escorting Angie Dickinson, along with Kim Novak and an architect named Fernando Parra. In a gesture typical of his private impulsiveness, Kennedy said, “Why don’t you jump in here and come out to Joe Alsop’s with me?” When Fay agreed, Kennedy suddenly had second thoughts about public consequences, saying he could “just see the papers tomorrow,” with accounts of the new president “speeding into the night” with a couple of movie stars. “Well, Redhead, for a moment I almost forgot that I was President of the United States,” Kennedy said. “It has its advantages and restrictions, and this is one of the latter. Good night.” Fay drove Dickinson and Novak back to their hotel and continued on to the home of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy. In later years there were persistent rumors that Kennedy had a sexual assignation with Angie Dickinson at the Alsop home. “Neither Angie nor Kim Novak went to Joe Alsop’s,” said Fay, adding that Dickinson had told him the sexual tryst story “was a total lie.” Bandleader Peter Duchin, who attended Alsop’s party, also said “there were no Hollywood stars there. Angie was a friend, and I would have noticed her.”

  Yet one Alsop guest had reason to wonder about Kennedy’s behavior that evening. Helen Chavchavadze, a twenty-seven-year-old brunette divorcée with two young daughters, had been involved with him since the previous summer. She was the first cousin of John Husted, the man Jackie had thrown over to marry Jack, as well as a classmate of Jackie’s sister, Lee, at Farmington. Helen Husted had left Bennington College after two years to marry David Chavchavadze, the son of a Romanov princess who had grown up in the palaces of St. Petersburg. During four years in Berlin, where David worked for the CIA, Helen had become fluent in Russian and German. “She was just gorgeous,” said Ben Bradlee, “totally pretty, well educated, and interesting.” She was also unconventional in her attitudes, with a mother who had graduated from Oxford and served as “a role model of freedom and rebellion.”

  Helen had met JFK in the spring of 1959 when Jackie invited her to a small dinner party in honor of Lee. Jack took a keen interest in Helen’s knowledge of Russia, pelting her with one question after another, finding out about her life and her thoughts. “He was not at that point flirtatious,” she recalled. A year later, in the summer of 1960, Chavchavadze was teaching part-time and finishing her college degree at Georgetown University when she got a call from Charley Bartlett inviting her to a dinner party. It turned out that Kennedy, who was then only weeks away from the Democratic nomination, had specifically requested her presence. After dinner, as she was driving home to Georgetown in her Volkswagen beetle, JFK pulled up beside her in his white convertible. “He followed me home,” she said. “I had an affair with Jack, and it began then.”

  She saw him a few times, and he once sent her a note from the campaign scribbled on Butler Aviation stationery saying he had been unable to reach her but planned to see her the following week. “One of the reasons is to discuss the education matter,” he wrote. “There are, however, other reasons.” “A little innuendo,” Chavchavadze recalled. “I was surprised that he pressed me, but I was up for it too.” Once JFK was elected, she figured the affair was over. But when she saw him at Joe Alsop’s, she was surprised that “he was cold and negative. I remember feeling neglected. It was the first time I realized I might not be the only clandestine affair.” She figured that “he may have snubbed me because he was having an assignation with someone else. It would not have surprised me if he had done that. It was typical of him.”

  Kennedy had not in fact given up on Chavchavadze. A few weeks after the inauguration, he walked into her house, which was across the street from his church in Georgetown, with Florida senator George Smathers. “By his appearance he was saying, ‘I am a free man. The Secret Service are not going to stop me,’” she said. “He was paying a call. It was broad daylight, and it was a statement: ‘I will be free to see the women I want to see in the White House.’” Kennedy would invite her from time to time for intimate evenings when Jackie was away, and Jackie would include Chavchavadze on the guest lists for their dinner dances and small dinner parties—the last of which was nine days before the assassination. “I never knew if Jackie knew, but I felt uncomfortable about her,” said Chavchavadze. “I always felt ambivalent and wanted to end it. . . . I was never someone who had extramarital affairs. It was not my style, but it was irresistible with Jack.”

  It seemed highly unlikely that Joe Alsop would knowingly condone a sexual liaison under his roof, given his intense affection for both Jack and Jackie. Alsop was a full-blown eccentric—“almost an artifact, the way he got himself up, and the picture he presented to the world,” said Teddy White’s wife, Nancy. Although he was only seven years older than JFK, Alsop had the sensibility of an earlier era. He was balding, and wore flamboyant spectacles with perfectly round black frames that rested on a large wedge of a nose. With his bespoke wardrobe (Savile Row suits and waistcoats, Lobb’s shoes, silk shirts sewn in Milan), he had a dandified elegance singular among his journalistic contemporaries. Philip Graham, president of the Washington Post, vividly recalled first encountering Alsop at age thirty in his Georgetown garden, eating breakfast and wearing a “weirdly shaped and more weirdly colored kimono.”

  Joe Alsop spoke in equally dramatic fashion, his patrician accent sprinkled with “dear boy” and “darling” as he drank scotch and waved his cigarette holder. Many acquaintances suspected what a select group knew: Alsop was homosexual. During a trip to the Soviet Union in 1957 he had been entrapped
by the KGB and photographed in flagrante with a young man. The Soviets had failed in their attempt to blackmail him into espionage, but he had been forced to reveal his behavior to the CIA and FBI. J. Edgar Hoover had shared the details with top members of the Eisenhower administration, and by 1960 the secret had filtered out into the political and journalistic community. “Joe was gay, and Jack Kennedy knew all about that,” said Ben Bradlee.

  Alsop showed no visible disquiet, however; he was protected by the instinctive arrogance of what Bradlee called an “exaggerated WASP” background. Alsop proudly referred to “cousin Eleanor” Roosevelt, and a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt, his grandmother’s older brother, adorned the front hallway of his home. Alsop was a product of Groton and Harvard, where he drank far too much in the salons of the Porcellian.

  Alsop presided over the liveliest table in Washington. (He would add a hostess in February 1961 by marrying Susan Mary Jay, the widow of his close friend Bill Patten; she entered the marriage knowing it would be platonic.) With the eye of a theatrical director, he cast his dinners with a scrupulous mix of politicians, diplomats, and scholars, commanded “general conversation,” and sat at the head of the table, his chin cupped in both hands, peering out with a mixture of hauteur and keen curiosity.

  As a columnist in the thirties for the New York Herald Tribune, Alsop had written scathingly about Joe Kennedy’s advocacy of isolationism and appeasement. Alsop had never liked the Ambassador, whose cowardice during the Blitz—spending many nights at his country estate during the London bombings—“made my flesh crawl,” he said. Alsop’s columns had caused “a mortal quarrel” with Joe Kennedy, but JFK could ill afford to hold such a grudge. “I am not like [Jack] who makes up to the people who attack him,” Joe Kennedy once told a friend.

  In his imperious way, Alsop had dismissed JFK as a playboy when they first met in 1947 after Kennedy’s election to Congress. It was only when Alsop returned to Washington in 1958 after a year in Paris that he saw Kennedy’s potential and became one of his most ardent boosters. Since 1945, Joe had teamed with his younger brother Stewart, and they had ranked with Walter Lippmann, James Reston, and Arthur Krock as Washington’s powerful columnists. The Alsops were fierce anti-communists, although the Yale-educated Stewart was a more measured voice who restrained Joe’s alarmist tendencies. Joe “wears gloom like a toga,” noted Time.

  But their partnership dissolved in 1958 when Stewart joined the Saturday Evening Post, and Joe on his own grew more shrill and less influential. Although raised a Republican, Joe became a relentless critic of the Eisenhower administration’s foreign policy and “stuffy and self-satisfied attitudes.” To Alsop, the Kennedys promised excitement, glamour, and much-needed change.

  Hitching his fortune to Kennedy rejuvenated Alsop’s career as he turned fifty. “Joe Alsop was a fawner,” said Tom Braden, Stewart’s closest friend. “He picked the Kennedys as his property, and in a sense they were. They came to dinner when asked. They did things which Joe was striving for, and he became the ‘in’ columnist.” By cultivating Alsop, Kennedy could neutralize the sharp voice that had stung his father and solidify important links to the Washington establishment.

  Mutual benefits aside, Alsop and the Kennedys genuinely enjoyed each other. Jackie was intrigued by Joe’s outrageous personality, his impeccable taste (she recalled one of his luncheons as “a voluptuous daydream . . . reliving every sip and bite—noisettes & mushroom rice & caviar & champagne”), and his expertise in art and archaeology. Alsop assumed an avuncular role with Jackie, offering her all sorts of practical advice—“when to put a touch more brown sugar in the crème brlée”—as well as guidance about the role of First Lady. “Jackie was a Bouvier and an Auchincloss, so Joe would be enchanted with that,” said Ben Bradlee.

  Kennedy relished Alsop’s acerbic wit, insights into the Roosevelts, and provocative arguments, including the “missile gap” theory—the notion that the United States was vulnerable to attack by Soviet long-range nuclear rockets—that JFK exploited in his presidential campaign. Like other prominent journalists, Alsop used his entrée to offer views on candidates for top administration positions, recommending moderates such as Dillon and seasoned diplomats David Bruce and George Kennan.

  Joe Alsop particularly appreciated that JFK “enjoyed pleasure. . . . It was one of his attractive traits,” which was why the new president wished to carry his enjoyment “a little longer” after the official festivities ended on inauguration night. Alsop had caught a ride with Peter Duchin and his date for that evening, Pam Turnure, not long before Kennedy instructed his driver to head for the columnist’s home. “All the lights on the outside were on,” Alsop recalled, and “Flo Smith and Afdera Fonda [were] beating on my door knocker in a determined manner.” Alsop barely had time to break out the champagne and start the fire before “an endless stream of guests” emerged from a line of limousines. When Kennedy arrived, he stood “in the bright light,” his hair flecked with snowflakes, his manner ebullient. Appropriately enough, Kennedy looked “like something on the stage.”

  As the new President entered, everyone awkwardly rose until he “made a small, almost imperceptible downward motion with his hand.” He was hungry, so Alsop offered a bowl of terrapin stew, rich with butter and redolent of sherry, which the President politely declined, although he did drink some champagne. Kennedy mingled for more than an hour before heading back to the White House at 3:21 a.m. Alsop was disappointed by Kennedy’s rejection of “the greatest of American delicacies.” Still, “it hardly mattered. I soon observed that what he really wanted was one last cup of unadulterated admiration, and the people crowding my living room gave him that cup freely, filled to the brim.”

  EIGHT

  The mantra of Jack Kennedy’s presidential campaign had been “let’s get this country moving again,” an expression of the impatience of Kennedy and his “New Frontiersmen.” “The atmosphere bubbles and sparkles like champagne,” said Avis Bohlen, the wife of veteran diplomat Charles Bohlen, “All these young alive faces bristling with a desire to get started.” Their arrival heralded a change in style and tone—a cool, finger-snapping approach akin to the Hollywood Rat Pack—but not the sort of radical reforms that the New Dealers had ignited three decades earlier.

  Eisenhower left office with a somber warning that the “military-industrial complex” threatened to dominate America’s economy and government. For most of his presidency, the nation enjoyed peace and prosperity, a period viewed by the Kennedy forces as one of sleepwalking complacency. The economy, however, had slid into a recession early in 1960, and unemployment stood near 7 percent. The Soviet Union had become a full-blown nuclear power, and cast a military shadow over Europe, as well as Laos and other Third World countries where Khrushchev advocated “wars of national liberation.” Two years earlier, thirty-two-year-old Fidel Castro had led a communist takeover of Cuba.

  While Kennedy’s inaugural address had foreshadowed a “long twilight struggle” on the world stage, his first months as president were defined by sunnier themes of renewal and hope. Ike was seventy-one when he left office, and now the nation seemed intoxicated by the youthful vigor and glamour of the Kennedy crowd. “The glow of the White House was lighting up the whole city,” Schlesinger observed. “Washington seemed engaged in a collective effort to make itself brighter, gayer, more intellectual, more resolute. It was a golden interlude.”

  Jack Kennedy had a deep distrust of bureaucracies, which he considered stubborn obstacles to presidential authority. He believed his own intelligence and charm could crack any problem and win over any opponent. Jackie liked to call her husband “an idealist without illusions.” He avoided abstract theories, preferring to meditate “on action, not philosophy,” said Ted Sorensen.

  The Eisenhower White House worked along a military model, with tight discipline, tables of organization, and lines of command that funneled decisions through a strong chief of staff. Because Ike was elderly and inarticulate, Kennedy and his advisers assu
med that forceful subordinates such as Chief of Staff Sherman Adams and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had made the decisions. “President Kennedy was under the mistaken impression that was shared by all the liberal Democrats around him that Eisenhower was not in charge,” said Douglas Dillon. “That was 100 percent wrong. Eisenhower did not advertise the fact that he decided everything.”

  Kennedy took a distinctly improvisational approach to his “ministry of talent.” He slashed the size of the White House staff and literally reinvented the wheel, situating himself at the hub, with numerous spokes radiating out to his men. “I can’t afford only one set of advisers,” Kennedy told Richard Neustadt, who counseled him on White House reorganization. “If I did that, I would be on their leading strings.”

  To maintain control, Kennedy grasped all the strings himself. The aim, said Neustadt, was “to get information in his mind and key decisions in his hands reliably enough and soon enough to give him room for maneuver.” Kennedy often gave the same assignment to several people, “unimpressed,” Neustadt noted, “by the emotional costs of duplication.” Kennedy said he wanted the “clash of ideas” and “the opportunity for choice.” In his compartmentalized fashion, Kennedy preferred to operate one on one, or in small “task forces” assigned to address specific problems. Not only did Kennedy insist on direct access to all his top advisers and cabinet officers, he felt free to dip into the bureaucracy and jump official channels to quiz experts on particular issues. He was the first president, said CIA official Richard Helms, to “deal up and down the line.”

  Such an ad hoc system placed a significant burden on Kennedy to set the agenda and ask the key questions. He also needed to exert “enormous energy to maintain these bilateral ties and [be] prepared to see a staggering number of people,” said Walt Rostow, deputy special assistant for national security affairs. Kennedy had to “carry on endless guerrilla warfare with everyone around him to make sure they weren’t closing out options that he wanted to keep open.” According to Sorensen, on an ordinary day Kennedy would be “on the phone more than 50 times . . . with a large portion of the calls taking place in the mansion before and after his hours in the office.”