Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Bob McNamara solidified his position through an unusual mixture of brainpower, loyalty, and dexterity. Before a meeting of the National Security Council to discuss Berlin, Kennedy gathered several top aides in his office. When Kennedy asked McNamara for his opinion, the defense secretary “gave the most brilliantly argued and authoritatively documented case for a national emergency that you could imagine, all with no notes,” recalled Ted Sorensen. Other aides weighed in, and Kennedy responded with a cogent rationale against a national emergency, which he viewed as unduly alarmist. The group then moved into the formal NSC meeting, and once again, Kennedy said, “What do you think, Bob?” at which point McNamara delivered what Sorensen remembered as “the most dazzling and authoritative argument on why we should not declare a national emergency.”

  In his own quiet fashion, Sorensen had become as close to a chief of staff as Kennedy could tolerate. He parsed and synthesized arguments as he exercised power with formidable reserve. He spoke softly and often paused deliberately, a psychological ploy that commanded attention while creating an aura of maturity. “Ted can look at you in silence better than any man I know,” noted Teddy White. “He can play with silence like a tool until you crack.” Idle chatter was anathema to Sorensen, and he struck many as peremptory. “I probably was abrupt,” he recalled. “But it was not aloofness or arrogance, although it might have been reticence. It was more the unbelievable volume of work. I suffered from sleep deprivation. I probably cut people off from time to time.”

  Bobby Kennedy used his influence more flamboyantly. Social life at Hickory Hill, the home he shared with his thirty-two-year old wife, the former Ethel Skakel, their seven children and collection of pets, occupied the opposite pole of the Kennedy court life. Most of the inner circle frequented Hickory Hill, with the Dillons and McNamaras topping the list of particular friends. Bobby named one of his children after the Treasury secretary and on Saturdays would arrive unannounced at the Dillon home with several from his brood, seeking company for a movie matinee.

  Jack and Jackie’s White House may have condoned strong drinks, smoking, and dancing until the early morning hours, but the party scene at Hickory Hill was notably uninhibited. Ethel set the exuberant tone that her socially uneasy husband tolerated. The sixth of seven children, Ethel had a madcap “anything goes” quality, concocting pranks such as unleashing a live chicken on the dining table and pushing presidential advisers (Arthur Schlesinger most notoriously) into her swimming pool in their evening clothes.

  Jack and Jackie seldom appeared, nor did Ethel and Bobby socialize much at the White House. Once when they did come to dinner, Mary Gallagher observed the sharp contrast between Jackie’s “subdued” manner and Ethel’s “peppy” personality. Bobby’s intensity was an obstacle to socializing with his brother. Bobby “never seemed to need any release” from the issues of the day, observed Chuck Spalding, “whereas the President obviously did.” “With Bobby there were no belly laughs, as there were with Jack,” said Red Fay.

  Bobby’s prevailing mood was suspicion. He could be a rough and tactless presence around the White House, which JFK found more useful than irksome. Once after fielding a difficult phone call, Kennedy told Ken Galbraith, “Bobby would just tell him to cut the crap. I’m more polite.” Bobby was known for retreating into discomfiting silences or subjecting people to aggressive inquisitions. “He was like a human drill,” said Douglas Dillon’s daughter Joan. As Harry Hopkins was for FDR, Bobby served as his brother’s “Lord Root of the Matter,” empowered to get to the heart of issues with “devastating questions that coming from the President would have had a more explosive impact,” said Arthur Schlesinger.

  It was clear, as Bobby’s aide Jim Symington said, that “Bobby knew instantly what Jack wanted. They talked every day as pilot and co-pilot in the same tank, rumbling through the country’s problems.” Many observed the brothers’ almost telepathic communication, anticipating each other’s thoughts, flashing signals with looks and gestures. As soon as Kennedy heard that the Berlin wall was going up his first command was, “Get Rusk on the phone. Go get my brother.”

  Yet JFK knew his brother’s weakness—his tendency to react too fiercely, and to judge everything as either black or white. “Jack has traveled in that speculative area where doubt lives,” said Chuck Spalding. “Bobby does not travel there.” JFK could—and did—overrule his brother because, as Walt Rostow pointed out, “He didn’t have to be nice to Bobby.”

  Bobby’s most conspicuous assignment came when Jack was in Paris and Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, was assassinated with machine guns supplied by the CIA. With Dean Rusk en route to Europe, Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles was technically in charge. Bobby, however, set up a command post on the seventh floor of the State Department and ordered U.S. Navy ships close to the island. Their purpose was to show support for the anti-communist faction trying to take control, but Bowles objected when Bobby—with McNamara’s backing—tried to send in marines as well. In his post–Bay of Pigs caution, JFK agreed with Bowles, although he didn’t disapprove of Bobby’s effort to poach on Bowles’s turf.

  By summer’s end Jack seemed to have recovered from his back injury, although it would be many months before he could pick up a golf club again. The most effective treatment was a new exercise regimen to strengthen his abdominal muscles prescribed by Dr. Hans Kraus, a specialist in rehabilitative medicine from New York. But unknown to either public or press, Max Jacobson remained in the picture, operating as a sort of court wizard, offering Kennedy his injections with surprising regularity. According to Jacobson’s expense records, from June through October 1961, he saw the President thirty-six times. When Dr. Eugene Cohen, the endocrinologist responsible for managing Kennedy’s Addison’s disease, learned of Jacobson’s role, he wrote JFK a stern warning: “You cannot be permitted to receive therapy from irresponsible doctors like M.J. [Jacobson]. . . . With such injections [patients] may perform some temporary functions in an exhilarated dream state. However, this therapy conditions one’s needs almost like a narcotic” and “is not for responsible individuals who at any split second may have to decide the fate of the universe.” Kennedy still declined to cut Jacobson loose, although he would rely on his services only intermittently in the following two years.

  Not long after Billy Brammer declared in mid-July that the President’s “roundering” had been curtailed by back problems, Kennedy was seeing other women again. On two Tuesday nights in late August and early September, he went out on the Honey Fitz for three-hour cruises down the Potomac with George Smathers and Bill Thompson, a railroad executive from Florida, and several comely women including Helen Chavchavadze. “Jack would just take them out on the boat and hug and kiss a little bit,” Smathers told Robert Kennedy biographer Evan Thomas several decades later. “It was very innocent really.” Chavchavadze recalled the cruises as “lighthearted. Jack let off steam. He had people around he could be himself with, to get away from the serious business of the presidency. He may have been in the back of the cabin with someone else, but it wasn’t me, not at that juncture, not in that place.”

  For several weeks in September, Otto Preminger was in Washington filming Advise and Consent, Allen Drury’s political thriller. The stars included Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Walter Pidgeon, Burgess Meredith, Franchot Tone, and Peter Lawford, as well as Farmington graduate Gene Tierney, who played a Washington hostess. Lawford came to dinner at the White House frequently, sometimes accompanied by a young woman to amuse the President. One such evening improbably surfaced in the New York Times, offered as a “Cinderella story” about twenty-one-year-old Susan Perry, who worked in the office of Republican senator Jacob Javits. The “pretty young receptionist” “attracted the attention” of Lawford and “blushingly accepted” the actor’s invitation to dine with Kennedy at the White House.

  With his Hollywood fascination, Kennedy kept close tabs on the film’s progress. “He got so excited he kept calling them to find o
ut what was going on,” said Look’s Laura Bergquist. “He didn’t want to be left out.” Kennedy tried several times to schedule dinner with the cast. They finally came to the White House for lunch with Jack and Jackie in late September. Also in attendance was Frank Sinatra, who was “showing off, being quite objectionable,” said Helen Chavchavadze, who filled out the distaff side along with Eunice, Jean, Ethel, Mary Meyer, and San Francisco newspaper heiress Nan McEvoy—all known for lively company as well as good looks.

  Dave Powers continued to serve as a beard for women visiting Kennedy in the evening. Powers jokingly referred to himself as “John’s other wife” when he assumed his customary “night duty” on the second floor at the White House. In Jackie’s absence, JFK would summon Powers to keep him company to relieve his “solitary confinement.” It was assumed that Powers would have dinner, chat with JFK if he liked, or amuse himself as Kennedy did paperwork. Sometimes JFK would play his favorite records on the stereo, dance tunes from the thirties and forties such as “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” “The Very Thought of You,” “Stardust,” and “Stormy Weather.” Only when Kennedy turned in would Powers drive home to his wife, Jo, and three young children in McLean, Virginia.

  For the last ten days in September, Jack joined his family for a vacation at Hammersmith Farm while Janet and “Unk” traveled in Europe. The sprawling gray nineteenth-century shingled home, with its red roof and “pepper-pot tower,” was situated on seventy-five acres overlooking Narragansett Bay, offering greater privacy than Hyannis. The pace was far more leisurely as well, with long cruises on the Honey Fitz. Jack held court on the fantail from his brown leather chair bolted to the deck, Bill Walton buzzed around with his movie camera, and FDR Jr. “stood on deck like an old sea dog, surveying the water.”

  Each day an airplane from Washington brought a pouch of official papers and intelligence briefings that JFK read “a lapful at a time,” and he had access to the White House by a specially installed phone link, although he took few calls. Instead, he reread Alfred Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand—“a great book,” said JFK. For the first time since he assumed the presidency, Kennedy was able to genuinely relax. “We sit for hours on the terrace just looking at the bay and drinking in the beauty & all one’s strength is renewed,” Jackie wrote to her mother. “You would never guess what this vacation has done for Jack. He said it was the best he ever had.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Joining Jack Kennedy for drinks on October 3, the day after the President’s return to the White House, Cy Sulzberger noted that he “seemed extremely well, suntanned and fit, but his face is a bit puffy”—a common observation that only those closest to JFK could link to cortisone treatments. (Because of his medication, Kennedy’s appearance varied significantly; ten days later, Molly Thayer would observe that the President “has grown thinner” and “lost the jowly look.”) Kennedy spoke again of Khrushchev, but more dispassionately, noting that the Soviet leader had seemed “much softer” of late. The President also ingratiated himself with Sulzberger by dismissing rival journalist Walter Lippmann as “very confused.”

  That night, with Jackie scheduled to return from Newport the following afternoon, Jack Kennedy had his first known private visit from Mary Meyer. As she would do on thirteen documented occasions in the following two years, Meyer signed in to see Evelyn Lincoln and was admitted to the White House residence. (She may have entered anonymously at other times, as the second person in “Dave Powers plus one.”) Meyer was also a conspicuous presence at all six of the Kennedys’ dinner dances, and she was included in another half dozen small lunch and dinner parties given by Jack and Jackie. Meyer’s confidante Anne Truitt does not believe that her intimacy with the President began as early as October 1961, but their friendship was already well established.

  Mary Pinchot Meyer and her younger sister, Tony Bradlee, had been raised in upper-class refinement in Manhattan and Grey Towers, a 3,600-acre estate in Pennsylvania, with the sort of advantages—horses, French governesses, elite private schools—Jackie had enjoyed. Both Pinchot sisters had even preceded Jackie at Vassar. But instead of Auchincloss propriety, the atmosphere of the Pinchot household was distinctly bohemian. Nude sunbathing was de rigueur, while weekend guests included writers, artists, and New York political activists.

  Mary had first encountered Jack at a Choate dance in 1935 when he was graduating and she was finishing her sophomore year at the Brearley School in New York. Reminiscing twenty-eight years later with William Attwood, Mary’s escort that evening, Kennedy “happily recalled having cut in on her on the dance floor.” Mary went on to work as a reporter before marrying Cord Meyer, a Yale-educated war hero who lost an eye to shrapnel as a marine lieutenant. (His memoir of wartime experiences won the O. Henry Prize in 1946.) Cord came from a socially prominent New York family and was considered one of the golden boys of his generation along with JFK, with whom he was featured in a magazine article about future leaders.

  As an idealistic advocate of world government (he would head the United World Federalists), Cord attended the UN conference in San Francisco in 1945 with Mary, who was covering it for United Press. There they encountered JFK, also working as a reporter; Jack and Cord took an instant dislike to each other that would never diminish. Back in Washington, Cord joined the CIA while Mary raised their three boys and took up painting. Their marriage began unraveling in the early fifties and collapsed several years later after their second son was struck by a car and killed.

  Mary moved to Georgetown, where she began an affair with “color field” painter Kenneth Noland, whose artistic style she admired. “She was probably affected by my work,” Noland recalled. “She wasn’t a professional painter, but she was a good painter, and she had ambitions.” Mary worked hard at her art and developed a minimalist style of vibrant circular themes. She also underwent psychotherapy, first briefly with a disciple of Wilhelm Reich in Philadelphia who also treated Noland, then with a Washington therapist.

  When Tony and Ben Bradlee returned to Washington from Paris in early 1959 and befriended the Kennedys, Mary joined their social group. She was by all accounts a luminous presence, with loosely styled blonde hair and bright blue eyes—the sort who reduced a cocktail party to a hush with a dramatic entrance. “She was extremely feminine as was Tony, in a quiet way,” said Ben Bradlee. “Mary was very earthy and really lovely looking, and she had no airs at all.”

  Like Jackie, Mary had an elusive quality. But Mary also exuded a frank sexuality, alluringly draping herself in her clothes in a manner that suggested spontaneity and independence, compared to Jackie’s rather armored and meticulous persona. Since adolescence, Mary had been aware of her power over men. “She had an eager charm,” said Anne Truitt. “She liked to give it a run. Mary sought attention the way a nymph rises to the surface of a stream. Wherever she went, she attracted it, and that gave her pleasure.” In Truitt’s judgment, “Mary lived to give and take pleasure.” Like Jack and Jackie, she operated as she pleased. “The secret to Mary’s personality was she didn’t care about conventions,” said her close friend Cicely Angleton, the wife of the CIA’s legendary chief of counterintelligence James Angleton.

  It is unclear precisely why Mary showed up at the White House on October 3. Since her privileged appearance at the White House dinner dance in March, she had been largely invisible until she moved onto JFK’s radar at the Advise and Consent luncheon two weeks earlier. Her appeal to Jack, in Ben Bradlee’s view, was that “she was a little out of reach, a different example of the species.” For all the starlets, models, and socialites in Kennedy’s orbit, he was intensely drawn to bright and original women—Jackie, Mary Meyer, Helen Chavchavadze, Diana de Vegh, even Marilyn Monroe. “Jack Kennedy once said to Mary, ‘What does Kenneth Noland have that I don’t have?’ and she said, ‘Mystery,’” recalled Cicely Angleton. “The President was duly taken aback.”

  The Washington social whirl hit top speed in the autumn. The newest star in town was David Ormsby Gore, who finally arr
ived in late October to present his credentials as ambassador. Jackie was more finicky than ever about the social ambiance she created. “She crawled on the floor among diagrams as she arranged the complex seating. She went over menus minutely,” wrote Hugh Sidey. Her judgments could be severe, as when she rejected Tish Baldrige’s plea to include Scottie Lanahan, the daughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a state dinner. “The 2 times I’ve seen Scotty [sic] she has gotten quite tight & really made a slight spectacle,” Jackie scribbled on the guest list. “Some other time.”

  “Standing is determined by entree to the White House,” Stewart Alsop told a friend, “and of course the final cachet is conferred by the descent of the roi soleil on a maison particulière.” The Kennedys ventured out less than they had a year earlier, but the “maison particulière” where they were likely to turn up was Joe Alsop’s home on Dumbarton Avenue. One December weekend when Jackie was at Glen Ora, Jack went there in typically impromptu fashion after returning with Dave Powers from a speechmaking trip through Palm Beach and Miami. The Alsops’ guests of honor were the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, who were planning to lend their collection of old master drawings to the National Gallery for an exhibit the following year.

  The Alsop dining room was packed with eighteen guests. As Susan Mary, Joe’s wife, was talking to the President about the National Gallery, he suddenly decided to show the museum to the Duchess of Devonshire. “Let’s go,” JFK said to John Walker, the museum’s director, who hastily made the arrangements. Kennedy and the Duchess arrived at the National Gallery before midnight, somewhat improbably joined by Dave Powers for the tour. “Our arrival caused great excitement,” said the Duchess of Devonshire. “I don’t think the President went to exhibitions as a rule the way Jackie did.” Kennedy and Powers didn’t return to the White House until 1:16 a.m.