Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  A more promising effort to jump-start the Kennedy presidency was his first official trip overseas. In early April he announced a visit to Paris to confer with French president Charles de Gaulle; in mid-May he added Vienna to the itinerary for a meeting with Nikita Khrushchev. These consultations, and the pomp surrounding them, would be a major part of Kennedy’s aggressive image-making.

  The prospect of a Paris visit caught the public imagination instantly. Press accounts speculated that Jackie would serve as her husband’s translator. Kennedy had a middling knowledge of French, telling Nicole Alphand, wife of the French ambassador, that he understood “about one out of every five words but always the words ‘de Gaulle.’” The White House hastened to clarify Jackie’s role, saying that instead of translating, she would be “tied up in other official good will duties.” But Jackie’s special French expertise—her linguistic fluency, Bouvier heritage, sojourns in Paris, knowledge and affinity for the history and culture—offered unmatched opportunities to burnish the image of the United States.

  Jackie’s view of the French was both subtle and amusing. During her junior year in Paris, she had remarked on the “strange Frenchmen in their shiny suits and squeaking shoes” who seemed “much too stuffy” but nevertheless introduced her to “the little hidden places.” Her favorite was the Kentucky Club, “an Existentialist night club” that by day was “dark and smoky” with “jazz . . . blaring,” its inhabitants—“Negroes and Chinese and unwashed boys with long hair”—“leaping around or necking frantically in the booths.” Jackie had evolved from her initial “drunken dazzled adoration” to an “easy going & healthy affection” for the city. She was intrigued, she told her sister, that one could “come out of a museum, walk down the street where Voltaire lived—and bang go into a little dive and be back in the present.”

  De Gaulle had been a source of special fascination for Jackie since World War II, when she had named her poodle Gaullie because her dog, like the French general, was “straight and proud with a prominent nose, and a fighter,” her stepbrother Yusha recalled. Later she read de Gaulle’s Mémoires in French; during a primary campaign swing in Wisconsin, she had appeared with volume two at her side. When Jackie and De Gaulle finally met, at a garden party at the French Embassy in 1960, he had declared, “The only thing I want to bring back from America is Mrs. Kennedy.”

  To prepare for her return to the City of Light, Jackie brushed up her language skills with a tutor from the French Embassy, read briefing papers prepared by the State Department, and organized a wardrobe of continental sophistication. She hewed to the now celebrated—and widely imitated—“Jackie look” of classic, simple tailoring, with an emphasis on what Oleg Cassini described as “sumptuous fabric, unusual color and distinctive details” to please the Parisian cognoscenti. For one appearance, she chose Cassini’s “jonquil yellow silk suit” intended to shimmer in the daylight. “She didn’t plan to outshine the President,” said Robert McNamara, “but she certainly gave thought to what her impact would be and how to plan her behavior and actions in a way that was supportive and compatible.”

  With Jackie in charge of the stagecraft, JFK focused on the substance. To Kennedy, de Gaulle was a “great and gloomy figure”—the hero of the French resistance during World War II, and as president since 1958 the apotheosis of French national pride. Kennedy knew, according to Sorensen, that the seventy-year-old de Gaulle could be “irritating, intransigent, insufferably vain, inconsistent and impossible to please.” After France had been driven out of Southeast Asia, de Gaulle opposed American military intervention there—a “bottomless military and political quagmire,” he called it. He was also working to build a French nuclear capability—both to achieve superpower status and to ensure an independent defense against the Soviets. In April, France tested its fourth atomic bomb.

  JFK had clashed once with the French before his presidency, when he gave his farsighted 1957 speech promoting independence for their colony in Algeria. The French establishment was “wild with fury.” Over a quiet lunch, Ambassador Hervé Alphand had admonished Kennedy for interfering in France’s efforts to resolve the situation. “He promised me not to pursue the question,” Alphand recalled. “He kept his promise.” When Kennedy fretted that he would suffer domestic political consequences for his position, his practical father assured him, “You’ll be out of the woods on the Algerian statement long before the people vote.”

  Kennedy readied himself for de Gaulle by ploughing through history books and contemporary analyses. He studied a translation of the de Gaulle memoirs so he could cite pertinent passages, and he was briefed in the Oval Office by Raymond Aron, the contrarian political philosopher and critic of de Gaulle. Bundy and Sorensen counseled JFK to lead his discussion with de Gaulle by asking questions. In a confidential memo, New York Times columnist Cy Sulzberger urged the President to “prepare a favorable atmosphere” beginning with areas of agreement, then progressing to more thorny issues.

  Kennedy relied mostly on advice from Macmillan, who took a philosophical view after a long history with his imposingly tall French counterpart, whom he nicknamed “the little pinhead.” On Kennedy’s behalf, Macmillan wrote to “my dear friend” de Gaulle, advising him to “talk to [Kennedy] very frankly and set out your views fully.” The Englishman well understood de Gaulle’s “pride, his inherited hatred of England,” and “his intense ‘vanity’ for France.” Macmillan cautioned Kennedy that “conversations with de Gaulle are quite difficult to conduct” because the Frenchman “sometimes puts his thoughts in a rather elliptical way.”

  Far more challenging to Kennedy was the summit with the sixty-six-year-old Khrushchev, whom Kennedy had met fleetingly when the Soviet leader visited the Senate in the fall of 1959. At that time, Khrushchev had pegged Kennedy as a man on the rise. The first overtures for a summit meeting had come just weeks after Kennedy’s inauguration, but the Bay of Pigs seemed to scuttle all prospects until Khrushchev surprisingly issued an invitation less than a month later. In one of his first forays into foreign policy as a back-channel operative for his brother, Bobby Kennedy met secretly with a Russian intelligence agent named Georgi Bolshakov, who led him to believe that Khrushchev might be ready to discuss a possible ban on nuclear weapons tests.

  The nuclear menace lay at the heart of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in 1949, but the magnitude of that threat took on new meaning in 1957, when they launched the Sputnik rocket into space and served notice that they could deliver nuclear weapons across the oceans in a half hour. JFK fanned American fears by harping on the “missile gap” during the presidential campaign. In fact, each superpower then possessed significant “overkill”—18,000 nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal and a smaller but still substantial amount on the Soviet side.

  Even as the two superpowers raced to amass nuclear arms, they (along with Britain) had voluntarily suspended atomic weapons tests since 1958 and had also engaged in arms control talks in Geneva. But in May 1960 the Russians shot down an American U-2 spy plane, which sabotaged a planned summit between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, and cooled the atmosphere for negotiations on nuclear issues. Spurred on by David Gore, JFK remained a believer in the test ban as a first step toward nuclear disarmament. The possibility of engaging Khrushchev on arms control seemed a worthy goal for the Vienna summit.

  Kennedy had no shortage of tactical advice on ways of approaching the Soviet leader. From India, Ken Galbraith relayed Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s warning that the Soviet premier was “a man of exceedingly fast responses.” Walter Lippmann, who had recently returned from the Soviet Union, observed that Khrushchev used deceptively simple language to connect with the average Russian, sometimes speaking in fables to make his points. CIA analysts warned that Khrushchev (who had shocked the world the previous year by brandishing his shoe during a speech at the United Nations) “is more aggressive when he’s tired.” Sixty-nine-year-old Averell Harriman, a forme
r ambassador to the Soviet Union, cautioned against taking Khrushchev’s pugnacity too literally or trying to debate him. Rather, Kennedy should try to deflect the Soviet leader’s bluster with humor.

  Both Kennedys followed a hectic schedule in the month preceding the European trip. Jackie went into overdrive on the White House restoration project, working with Harry du Pont on the legal framework for donations as well as vetting and accepting donations. She visited Winterthur with Jayne Wrightsman and philanthropist Mary Lasker, tramping through 120 rooms of American furniture; on the return flight to Washington, Lasker gave Jackie $10,000, the first cash contribution to the Fine Arts Committee for the White House.

  Jackie’s decorating sensibility had evolved to embrace the Empire style of Monroe and its antecedents in the France of Napoleon and Josephine. The French aesthetic of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was infused with the motifs of classical Greece that had long fascinated Jackie. A French flavor even appeared in the wallpaper she chose for the Diplomatic Reception Room and second-floor President’s Dining Room covered with American scenes. Designed in nineteenth-century France, the murals featured people who looked “more Parisian than American.”

  Jackie once told Adlai Stevenson that as a neophyte first lady she seemed to spend her time “under a hair dryer getting ready for the next appearance.” At their first state dinner, for pint-sized President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, Jackie wore a dramatic “Nefertiti” one-shoulder gown of pale yellow organza. For entertainment, she organized a floodlit full-dress parade under the stars by five hundred men from the four armed services.

  A few weeks later Prince Rainier III of Monaco (nicknamed “Prince Reindeer” by Tish Baldrige) and his wife, the former Hollywood actress Grace Kelly, came for lunch. There had been rumors during the fifties that JFK and the exquisitely beautiful Kelly “had nurtured crushes on each other,” said Baldrige. When Kelly—who was four months younger than Jackie—was briefly engaged to Oleg Cassini, Joe Kennedy had propositioned her—a tale that “never failed to amuse” JFK, according to Cassini. Jackie had enjoyed her own joke at Kelly’s expense, when she persuaded the actress to dress as a night nurse to surprise JFK in the hospital after his back operation. “I suspect [Jackie] got Grace into a nurse’s uniform so the actress would not look nearly as smashing as she did in a French designer original,” said Baldrige.

  The small White House luncheon included the Franklin Roosevelts, Claiborne Pells, and William Walton. JFK engaged Princess Grace in light banter, correctly guessing that she was wearing a dress by Hubert de Givenchy. But while the prince was expansive, the princess appeared subdued. As Walton later explained, “She was so scared of coming to the luncheon that she had two double Bloody Marys and was bombed.”

  For Jack’s forty-fourth birthday on May 29, Jackie conspired with Paul Fout to create a three-hole golf course at Glen Ora—“rather long & difficult ones—so it will be a challenge to play & not just so easy that one gets tired of it.” To further amuse Jack, she asked that the holes have Confederate flags that would “not be visible from the road.” The Bradlees visited Glen Ora on May 20 for a birthday celebration, and Ben and JFK inaugurated the course, which had grown to four holes on “9,000 square yards of pasture, filled with small hills, big rocks, and even a swamp,” Bradlee recalled. JFK “shot the course record, a thirty-seven for four holes.”

  In mid-May the Kennedys also spent a restorative weekend at the Wrightsman estate in Palm Beach with Chuck and Betty Spalding. With its seventeenth-century parquet floors from the Palais Royal in Paris, Louis XV furniture, and eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper in the large salon, Charlie and Jayne’s home offered a far more opulent setting than Joe Kennedy’s La Guerida. JFK could swim in the large saltwater swimming pool heated to 90 degrees; a staff of fourteen servants inside, a half dozen outside, and Jules, “the giant French chauffeur,” could cater to every need—an experience Cecil Beaton likened to “bathing in the milk of luxury.”

  For four straight days, Jack and Chuck played partial rounds of golf on three different courses—the Palm Beach Country Club near the Kennedy estate as well as the Breakers and the exclusive Seminole—with Betty joining them for one game. But the pressure and pace of official activity had taken its toll on Jackie. Although she had begun her telephone talks with Dr. Finnerty, and she exercised as much as she could manage, she couldn’t banish her anxieties as she approached her first state visit at the age of thirty-one. “I think she realized how important she was to the world, and it was terrible pressure,” said Tish Baldrige. “She was not moody, she was on steady ground, but she would wake up with huge circles under her eyes because she hadn’t slept one bit.”

  In Palm Beach, Jackie’s complaints of a severe migraine drove her husband to summon Dr. Max Jacobson, a Manhattan physician to the rich and famous, who was called “Dr. Feelgood” for his mysterious injections laced with amphetamines. A disheveled figure with fingernails darkened by chemical stains, Jacobson had a strong German accent and a direct manner. He operated at the fringe of medical practice, and his loosely regulated stimulants produced feelings of exhilaration and clarity, although little was yet known about such side effects as agitation, grandiosity, lingering depression, and even psychosis.

  Among Jacobson’s patients were Oleg Cassini; Mark Shaw, a Life photographer admired by Jackie; and Chuck Spalding, who suggested the doctor’s services to JFK during the presidential campaign. Several days before his first debate with Nixon, JFK had secretly visited Jacobson’s office for an injection to relieve symptoms of fatigue and muscle weakness that “interfered with his concentration and affected his speech,” according to an unpublished account by Jacobson. Afterwards Kennedy told Jacobson “he felt cool, calm and very alert.”

  Now Kennedy wanted Jacobson’s help for Jackie’s “periodic depression and headaches,” the doctor recalled. After receiving Jacobson’s injection, “her mood changed completely.” Kennedy had no need for treatment during this visit, as his vigorous golf schedule indicated. He had been adhering to the swimming fitness program prescribed by Janet Travell in February, along with her daily procaine shots in his back. Still, according to Dr. Travell’s records, since taking office Kennedy had been intermittently afflicted with gastrointestinal problems, urinary tract discomfort, fevers, and insomnia. Kennedy gave little evidence of these ailments, although during one meeting Ken Galbraith noticed that JFK was so “bone tired” that when he offered the ambassador a cup of tea, he instead “absentmindedly filled the cup with milk and sugar.”

  As a warmup to their transatlantic trip, the Kennedys made a two-day visit in mid-May to Canada. It was a ceremonial success, as “normally blasé” citizens of Ottawa thronged the streets to hail the Americans: out of a population of 280,000, an estimated 70,000 turned out. Jackie smiled sweetly as JFK struggled through his arrival speech in French and wryly noted the “unfortunate division of labor” that compelled her to remain silent. Even after she canceled a television interview due to fatigue, Jackie scored what the press called a “major triumph” with Canada’s leaders and citizens, who were thrilled simply to watch her excitement over equestrian drills by red-coated Mounties.

  The President wrenched his back on the first day when he and Jackie attended a tree-planting ceremony at the governor general’s residence. While Jackie politely turned three “tiny” spadefuls, JFK heaved his shovel repeatedly into the earth around the red oak sapling. He felt stabbing pain, but thought it would disappear. Two days of hitting golf balls with Ben Bradlee on the Glen Ora “course” the following weekend doubtless aggravated the injury, leaving JFK to hobble on crutches at home and in the privacy of the Oval Office.

  On Tuesday, May 23, Kennedy sneaked Max Jacobson into the White House for four days of amphetamine shots “to relieve his local discomfort” and “provide him with additional strength to cope with stress,” recalled Jacobson. His treatments coincided with the “second State of the Union address” that Thursday, during which
Kennedy ignored many passages in the text and interjected new language. Jacobson noted that Jackie was in “comparatively good spirits,” but she too received the treatments before leaving Wednesday night for five days of rest and relaxation at Glen Ora. Concerned about the impact his injury could have on his stamina in the Paris and Vienna meetings, Kennedy asked Jacobson to join him for the trip.

  JFK had to deal with one domestic crisis before his departure when a mob of more than a thousand whites attacked a busload of Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Alabama. The victims, black and white members of the Congress of Racial Equality, had traveled from Birmingham to challenge a whites-only policy at the Montgomery bus station. Days earlier, when another bus had been set afire between Anniston and Birmingham, Kennedy had focused primarily on the propaganda value Khrushchev could find in American racial conflict. “Can’t you get your goddamned friends off those buses? Stop them!” Kennedy lamented to Harris Wofford, his civil rights adviser.

  Faced with a second group of Freedom Riders determined to go to Montgomery, JFK had authorized Bobby to send in U.S. Marshals if necessary. The Montgomery riot on Saturday the twentieth—the very day Kennedy was sinking putts near Confederate flags on his new golf course—brought out the U.S. Marshals as well as national guardsmen. One of the injured was Bobby’s deputy at the Justice Department, John Seigenthaler, who was clubbed from behind as he tried to help a white girl escape the mob. Days later, Bobby urged the protesters to take time to cool off, and the crisis subsided. As martial law ended in Montgomery on the eve of JFK’s departure, he exuded confidence, proclaiming that he would “not retreat a single inch” in his meeting with Khrushchev.