Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

On Arthur Schlesinger’s recommendation, she read Henry Adams’s classic Washington novel, Democracy, and declared herself “enthralled” as well as grateful that she had waited to read it, as “I wouldn’t have loved it as much as I do now.” She traveled incognito (wearing a wig with blonde braids) to Provincetown to see Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession with Gore Vidal and Bill Walton. Vidal told his biographer that at his motel Jackie “bounced up and down on the bed in playful, semi-anonymous pleasure.”

  Jackie periodically visited Bunny Mellon, who lived in Oyster Harbors, an exclusive enclave on the Seapuit River in nearby Osterville; once she went to Boston with the Mellons and Adele Astaire Douglas to see Sail Away, a comedy by Noël Coward, Paul and Bunny’s close friend. They dined first at the Ritz, and after the show, Jackie “was sweet to the whole company,” Coward recalled.

  Jackie “liked Hyannis Port because it was her down time,” said Joan Kennedy. “She had privacy and quiet to pursue her interests. I didn’t bother her unless she called me.” When she and Joan were together, they talked of family and cultural interests, skirting personal matters and politics. “She could relax with me,” said Joan. “Jackie didn’t say a lot of stuff. She liked having me because I didn’t say a lot either.”

  Jackie stayed in almost daily contact with her White House staff, while others took on her official duties. After returning from Greece, an exasperated Tish Baldrige had tried to quit, but the President persuaded her to stay on and braced Jackie about managing Baldrige more carefully. “She was wonderful again,” said Baldrige, “but it wore off.” Baldrige kept pushing Jackie to assume new activities, and Jackie continued to resist, even when it was a pet project such as the series of young people’s concerts on the South Lawn. For the inaugural concert that August, the President welcomed the young performers as his wife’s representative.

  From afar, Jackie oversaw the accumulation of furniture, paintings, and objects for the White House, even as she steered clear of conflicts among her various advisers on decor. Lorraine Pearce, the first White House curator, was as rigorous as Baldrige in her own fashion—a meticulous scholar trained at Winterthur who favored Harry du Pont’s views rather than those of Boudin. When Jackie hired Pearce in March, she called her “brilliant and full of energy and charm . . . as excited as a hunting dog.” After only four months on the job, Pearce found herself in a “difficult situation,” Metropolitan Museum curator James Biddle wrote to Harry du Pont, reduced to serving as “coordinator of a variety of decorating whims.”

  Among the patrons who signed on that summer were Douglas and Phyllis Dillon, who donated exquisite Empire furniture for the Red Room, and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, who gave what Jackie described as a “van load of treasures” including Sheraton settees for the Green Room. “I feel a bit the way I did when my son was born and I couldn’t see him for four days,” Jackie wrote breathlessly to Bernice Garbisch and her husband. Sister Parish also enlisted her friends John and Frances Loeb to finance Jackie’s Louis XVI plan for the Yellow Oval Room on the second floor. Through the legerdemain of Jackie and Jayne Wrightsman, Parish incorporated the ideas of Boudin, yet maintained her pride of authorship. Jackie praised Loeb’s generosity by inquiring, “Shall we have a little statue of you on the mantelpiece?”

  During the summer Jackie also worked on an article for Life on the White House restoration in collaboration with Hugh Sidey. The idea had been percolating since the spring, and Jackie kept postponing her deadline. Sidey even traveled to Hyannis several times, only to find that Jackie was elsewhere. “One time I sat for three days in the rain,” recalled Sidey. In late August he was back in Iowa when the call came that the manuscript was ready. He found Jackie “in a skimpy bikini, all greased up, lying on a chaise and eating grapes. Oleg was there, a model named Robyn Butler, a bunch of others. I remember thinking there was a whiff of decadence.” Jackie gave him the manuscript “rolled up like the Dead Sea Scrolls, written on papers from yellow pads.” The article was unfocused and had to be rewritten under Sidey’s byline.

  Life for Jack in Washington was as fraught as Jackie’s in Hyannis was idyllic. The European trip had enhanced his image, but it accomplished little of substance. Not only had Kennedy been unable to produce any progress on banning nuclear weapons tests, he now had Khrushchev’s dark ultimatum on Berlin to worry about. Although he flashed a hint of humor to Billings—dealing with the Soviet leader, JFK said, “was like dealing with Dad—all give and no take”—Kennedy couldn’t shake his distress over the encounter in Vienna.

  “For weeks after he returned he talked about little else,” recalled Ben Bradlee. “He carried excerpts from the official translation of his talks with Khrushchev around with him wherever he went, and read chunks of them to me several times.” After the military estimated that seventy million Americans could die following a nuclear exchange, JFK shared his anguish with Bobby. “Tears came into his eyes,” Bobby recounted to Hugh Sidey. “He was sitting on his bed and he said, ‘Bobby, that is just incomprehensible.’” Bobby told Sidey, “It was the only time I’ve seen him cry.” In meetings, Kennedy was uncharacteristically distracted; according to one White House staff member, “he sometimes ceases to listen as he stares into space—apparently searching for an answer to some nagging problem.” Even Billings found him “suddenly . . . hard to get close to.”

  Kennedy’s first instinct was to reach for the most hawkish Democrat he could find: Dean Acheson, Truman’s highly respected secretary of state. The sixty-eight-year-old diplomat was known for his brilliant mind and intimidating eloquence, not to mention his withering criticisms. “Whoever is flailed by him will long remain sore,” David Bruce once remarked. With his close-clipped mustache and crusty manner, Acheson was the quintessential establishment man. Kennedy had consulted him on cabinet appointments and had followed his advice on Rusk for State and Dillon for Treasury.

  Yet Acheson had an uneasy relationship with the Kennedys, including Jackie. Her displeasure stemmed from his 1958 book, Power and Diplomacy, in which he took JFK to task for his speech on Algeria, declaring “this impatient snapping of our fingers . . . was a poor way to treat an old and valued ally.” Not long after the book came out, Acheson encountered Jackie on a train making its way slowly to Washington in a blizzard. As they settled into the parlor car together, she turned from soft-spoken ingenue to protective tigress, sharply rebuking Acheson for unfairly attacking her husband. Acheson attempted to deflect her by proposing that since they faced a long journey they should avoid arguing. Jackie agreed to be pleasant but sulkily declined to say much. Days later, Acheson received a letter from Jackie fiercely inquiring “how one capable of such an Olympian tone can become so personal when attacking someone for political difference.” Replied Acheson, “The Olympians seem to me to have been a pretty personal lot.”

  JFK followed the axiom that “in politics you don’t have friends, you have allies,” and he needed Acheson’s gravitas to help craft a muscular response to the Soviets. The recommendations Acheson forcefully presented on June 29, however, pushed too close to the brink of nuclear war for Kennedy’s comfort: an intense buildup of military might, including the deployment of several divisions in West Germany; the declaration of a national emergency; and a call-up of the reserves. In the following weeks, Kennedy spent much of his time studying his “Berlin Book,” a black looseleaf notebook in which he collected position papers responding to the Acheson plan.

  Schlesinger, who had previously told JFK he considered Acheson to be “consumed in vanity and bitterness,” judged the elder statesman’s analysis “rather bloodcurdling” and offered a five-page memo outlining diplomatic options. Galbraith similarly weighed in from India, castigating those “asking only that we advertise our willingness to risk a deep thermonuclear burn.” Sorensen offered an argument that especially resonated with his boss: “We should not engage Khrushchev’s prestige to a point where he felt he could not back down from a showdown.” As he did before with Laos, Sorensen nudged Kenne
dy toward exploring a peaceful solution.

  During a cruise on the Marlin in early July, Kennedy quizzed Rusk, McNamara, and General Maxwell Taylor, the newest member of the White House staff. At Bobby’s urging, Kennedy had designated the hawkish Taylor his personal military adviser. Taylor was a handsome and confident intellectual fluent in Japanese, German, Spanish, and French—a prototypical New Frontiersman. “We need a man like Taylor to give things a cold and fishy eye,” Bobby said.

  At Sorensen’s suggestion, Kennedy decided to make a televised speech about his policy on Berlin. The President’s July 25 address stopped short of Acheson’s state of emergency but included an addition of $3.45 billion ($20.7 billion today) to the defense budget—nearly $1 billion less than Acheson had recommended, but a significant increase at a time when military spending totaled $47.5 billion. Defense spending represented 9 percent of the gross domestic product, compared to 3.4 percent four decades later under George W. Bush.

  This measure was JFK’s first step toward implementing a “flexible response” in American military strategy that he had been considering since the presidential campaign when he first read about it in The Uncertain Trumpet by Maxwell Taylor. Instead of the Eisenhower administration’s doctrine of massive nuclear retaliation in a confrontation with the Soviet Union, Kennedy wanted more options than “holocaust and humiliation.” Following Taylor’s framework, Kennedy approved a progression of responses—from covert operations through counterinsurgency guerrillas to engagement by an enlarged army, navy, and air force—that would meet a range of threats. It was Kennedy’s hope that beefing up conventional forces in Europe could deter Soviet forces from making any hostile moves.

  In strong language Kennedy asserted the Allies’ legal right to be in Berlin and declared that “an attack upon that city will be regarded as an attack upon us all. . . . We do not want to fight, but we have fought before.” But Kennedy also signaled a willingness to negotiate a formula for Germany’s unification and self-determination. In his peroration, Kennedy used ideas suggested by Max Freedman, Washington correspondent for Britain’s liberal Manchester Guardian, asking Americans for patience because in the battle with communism “there is no quick and easy solution.”

  Khrushchev’s response barely three weeks later shocked the world, but not Kennedy and his men. They had long been aware that East German refugees—many of them well-educated professionals—were fleeing to the West through Berlin. The outflow had been accelerating over the summer—nearly thirty thousand in the month of July—which sharpened Kennedy’s awareness of Khrushchev’s problem. “Kennedy wasn’t the type to feel someone else’s pain,” said historian Philip Zelikow, “but he spent a lot of time thinking in cold clinical terms how Khrushchev would see a situation and react.”

  In the first days of August, Kennedy was walking along the colonnade to the Oval Office when he said to Walt Rostow, “The Russians are going to block off access to West Berlin from the East, and there is not a damn thing we can do about it.” Kennedy explained that the “brain drain” to the West was imperiling Khrushchev’s position not only in East Germany but in all of Eastern Europe. While the United States could go to war to defend West Berlin, Kennedy told Rostow, “We won’t go to war to keep East Germany from bleeding to death.”

  By various winks and nods, through private emissaries as well as public utterances, Kennedy indicated to Khrushchev the sentiments he expressed to Rostow. When asked about the refugee problem at an August 10 news conference, Kennedy said the United States had no position on the issue. Three days later, East German soldiers backed by Soviet troops erected barbed-wire barricades between East and West Berlin; within weeks the wire was replaced by an imposing concrete wall.

  The wall was an egregious affront to freedom, but Kennedy knew that it effectively neutralized the crisis that began in Vienna. “Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?” Kennedy said to Kenny O’Donnell. “. . . This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a very nice solution but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” Khrushchev stopped making noise about Allied rights of access to West Berlin, and well before the end of the year dropped his threat to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany.

  Kennedy flexed American military muscle only once—in part for Khrushchev’s benefit but mostly to reassure anxious West Berliners. Five days after the first appearance of barbed wire, Kennedy ordered 1,500 troops to West Berlin in a convoy through East Germany, and he sent Lyndon Johnson to meet them. Addressing 350,000 West Berlin citizens, Johnson pledged, “This island does not stand alone!”

  It was a singular moment in the spotlight for Johnson. In May, Kennedy had sent him on a fact-finding tour of Asia—the sort of trip Johnson welcomed. “It was where he was in charge of his life,” said Liz Carpenter, “a way to establish himself and have his own persona.” But while Kennedy had assigned Johnson the serious task of preparing a report on South Vietnam, the tour had been noteworthy mainly for the comic relief of Johnson’s encounter with a camel cart driver in Pakistan. “Come and see us, heah?” Johnson had said to Bashir Ahmed. At the instigation of a Karachi newspaper columnist, Bashir surprisingly accepted the invitation to visit the United States the following October.

  Johnson got the full measure of praise for his Berlin visit, but he exercised no influence during the crisis deliberations. He had sided with Acheson’s hard line, showing what Walt Rostow called “conventional toughness . . . without really seeing all the complications.” Johnson had better luck with his other responsibilities. Taking advantage of Kennedy’s new emphasis on space exploration, the Vice President helped engineer the choice of Houston for the new $60 million command center for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

  After navigating several crises, Kennedy had not fundamentally changed the way he made decisions. “He is sort of an Indian snake charmer,” a disappointed Dean Acheson wrote to Harry Truman. “He toots away on his pipe and our problems sway back and forth around him in a trancelike manner, never approaching, but never withdrawing. . . . Someday one of these snakes will wake up; and no one will be able even to run.”

  But Kennedy was learning which of his men were reliable, which theories were reasonable, and what machinery was most effective. In Douglas Dillon’s view, JFK was discovering “who made sense. He spent less time listening to anybody and everybody. He listened partly to keep people and groups friendly, not just for decisions. He would listen and massage everyone while deciding. He would listen and build support, and in his questions he wanted to be sure you thought through and understood the implications of your recommendations. He wasn’t ever argumentative. He was trying to find out so he could better understand.”

  As national security adviser, Mac Bundy was responsible for pulling foreign policy opinions and data together and offering his analysis to Kennedy. Before the Bay of Pigs, Bundy had only rudimentary contacts throughout the government bureaucracy, which impeded his effectiveness. Now his new basement West Wing office had become a clearinghouse for intelligence.

  Kennedy admired Bundy’s capacity for “a tremendous amount of work.” The President could also communicate easily with Bundy in “rapid fire shorthand.” After Kennedy had left the room, Bundy knew his boss’s thinking well enough to accurately convey what needed to be done. “He doesn’t fold or get rattled when they’re sniping at him,” Kennedy observed. Yet a colleague lamented Bundy’s “iron faith in the definitiveness of his yes or no,” and his ability to “make everything he says sound plausible that . . . scares the hell out of me.”

  Bundy’s confident approach tended to overshadow Dean Rusk, a quiet and controlled man who became known as “the Buddha” for his impassive demeanor. “Rusk plays his cards so close,” observed Dean Acheson, “he can’t see them himself.” Bundy was “very correct” with Rusk, said Arthur Schlesinger, “but he always presented the State Department position better than the State Department.”

  Dillon e
njoyed both professional and social intimacy with Kennedy. Not only were he and his lively wife, Phyllis, major donors to Jackie’s cause, they were among the handful of insiders who entertained the Kennedys at home. Their stucco villa in Washington’s fashionable Kalorama neighborhood was like “one of those Italian palaces on a small but perfect scale,” noted Jewel Reed. “The opulence is a rare thing in this day and age, and yet it is so understated that it couldn’t possibly be out of keeping with the New Frontier.”

  On economic policy, Dillon’s cautious positions continued to win favor with Kennedy. In the days before JFK’s Berlin speech, Bobby Kennedy, backed by McNamara, Johnson, and Rusk, had proposed an income tax increase to help finance an expanded military budget. Dillon argued that such a hike would dampen the economic expansion that was beginning to pull the country out of recession, and Kennedy promptly rejected Bobby’s idea. Appraising Dillon’s rising status, Stew Alsop called him “a brilliant bureaucratic infighter.”

  Even Ken Galbraith, who initially regarded Dillon as an “obdurate Republican,” concluded that the secretary of the Treasury was an “excellent operator.” Galbraith kept pressing his economic agenda at every opportunity. “Galbraith would come back and see Kennedy and tell him how terrible everything was because we were not spending enough money,” Dillon said. “Kennedy would ask me questions Galbraith had posed, and I would answer them. Nothing ever had any effect.” Once, when Dillon thought Galbraith was in India, Kennedy asked “a particularly exotic question about the economy,” recalled Dillon. “I said, ‘Mr. President, I’ll look into that. By the way, is Galbraith back in town?’ The President laughed and laughed and said yes.”

  Galbraith was more successful in getting Kennedy’s attention with his assessments of the situation in India, Vietnam, Laos, and China. By the fall of 1961, Galbraith’s missives across the ocean—what he called his “Indo-Talleyrand Series” with a nod to the French diplomat and politician—were part of Jack and Jackie’s routine reading. The envoy’s efforts to avoid “tedium” resulted in some eye-catching observations. “Saigon,” Galbraith reported, “has the most stylish women in all Asia. They are tall with long legs, high breasts, and wear white silk pajamas and a white silk robe, split at the sides to the armpits. . . . On a bicycle or scooter they look very compelling.”