Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Out at Glen Ora, Jackie frequently rode with both the Piedmont and Orange County Hunts. In November, her frisky mount, Bit of Irish, tossed her over a post and rail fence. Her fall was captured by a local photographer and would later be splashed across two pages of Life. At the hunt breakfast following the meet, no one knew about the First Lady’s spill. “Jackie didn’t look the least disheveled or shaken up,” recalled her hostess, Kitty Slater. Jackie arrived with Eve Fout, shed her cork-lined velvet cap and riding coat, and stood in her shirtsleeves and canary vest, sipping Dubonnet on the rocks. “She was easy, natural and gracious,” Slater recalled. Jackie complimented her hostess on “this lovely old house,” and before leaving, Jackie asked to borrow a book called Fifty Years of White House Gossip.

  Jackie now began to put her strong cultural imprint on state occasions, arranging a Shakespeare performance on a new East Room stage for President Ferik Ibrahim Abboud of the Sudan, and a concert by cellist Pablo Casals for Governor Luis Muñoz MarÍn of Puerto Rico. In response to a White House request for “red meat” after dinner, the Shakespearean excerpts included the murder scene from Macbeth as well as passages from comedies; among the guests was Helen Sandison, Jackie’s professor of Shakespeare at Vassar. The presentation evoked “the polite drawing room evenings of Shakespeare commanded by Queen Victoria,” the New York Times reported.

  The Casals evening inspired similarly royal allusions, with Time comparing it to “a concert led by Haydn at the court of the Esterhazys.” The 153 guests included major American composers as well as prominent conductors in white tie and tails. “English royalty entertains movie stars,” said composer Gian Carlo Menotti. “Our president entertains artists.” Wearing a chartreuse beaded gown by Cassini, Jackie presided over the evening like “a willowy medieval princess who had stepped down from a painting, with her top knot of hair interwoven with black velvet and pearls.”

  Lee came on November 7 for an extended stay. As they had the previous March, the Kennedys decided to throw a dinner dance “in honor of” Jackie’s sister as well as Giovanni “Gianni” and Marella Agnelli, who were visiting from Italy. The Kennedys had met the Agnellis during trips to the south of France and at the Wrightsman home in Palm Beach. They also had a connection through Franklin Roosevelt Jr., who was the American representative for Fiat, Agnelli’s automotive empire.

  Not only was Agnelli a powerful and enormously wealthy industrialist, he was a famous playboy, and Marella was one of Europe’s most stylish women. Gianni and Jack greatly enjoyed each other’s company. “In some things they were similar,” said Marella. “They had vivid curiosity about everything, and also being easily bored. Both Gianni and Jack Kennedy always if they were in one place wanted to be in another.” Jack was equally enchanted by Marella. Some days later at a party at the Shrivers’, Nancy Dickerson watched JFK’s “intense conversation with the beautiful wife of Giovanni Agnelli,” a scene Dickerson found “titillating.” To Marella, Jack “looked to me extremely like Carlo my brother. He was charming and easy to be with,” and Jackie was “very warm, and she wanted to have fun.”

  The black-tie candlelit dinner dance for eighty on Saturday, November 11, offered perhaps too much fun. The women “had spent hours and days on their dress and with remarkable results,” observed Ken Galbraith. “This and youth made for sensational effect.” Lester Lanin played, and Oleg Cassini introduced the twist, the hip-gyrating dance sensation that was sweeping the country. The twist, which originated at New York’s Peppermint Lounge, was considered so improperly suggestive that Pierre Salinger denied it had been part of the evening’s festivities. Charley Bartlett, a self-confessed prude, afterwards urged JFK to ban the dance at the White House. “That crowd has been getting along for years on champagne and the fox trot, and they won’t need the twist to keep them stirred up,” Bartlett wrote. “It’s bound to get out, and it doesn’t seem to me to be worth the price however small.”

  The champagne flowed until 4 a.m., and many partygoers got hopelessly drunk. Lyndon Johnson fell on Helen Chavchavadze as they were dancing. “He slid to the floor and lay like a lox,” recalled Mary Bailey Gimbel, a guest from Manhattan who had known Jack and Bobby since school days. New Yorker Heyward Isham had to hoist LBJ to free Helen. During an after-dinner toast to Lee, Franklin Roosevelt mistook Oleg for Stas (both men sported mustaches), as Kennedy buckled over with laughter. In the West Wing the next day, a severely hung over Ken Galbraith watched as a wobbly Mac Bundy “went over his desk three times in search of a paper we were there to discuss, failed to find it and finally asked me why I had come in.” For others, though, the consequences were less amusing.

  One of the more dyspeptic guests was Gore Vidal, Jackie’s distant relative by marriage. Although Jackie had not known Vidal until she was in her twenties, she and Jack were impressed by his talents as a writer and amused by his company; he was “filled with charm and malice,” wrote Schlesinger. After an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1960, Vidal had penned an admiring piece about JFK for the Sunday Telegraph in London. The Kennedys had entertained him in Hyannis Port and at the White House; only two weeks earlier, Vidal had joined Jack, Jackie, Eunice, and Bill Walton at the International Horse Show. During dinner that Friday evening, Jackie had announced to her guests, “We are old-fashioned observant Catholics,” as she produced a tub of Beluga caviar. “Jackie dragged us all to the horse show,” Vidal recalled. “Jack didn’t want to go. He was fuming over it.”

  Vidal’s conversations with Kennedy skittered from politics to sexual gossip to culture. A proud libertine, Vidal was delighted that Kennedy enjoyed Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, the antithesis of Anglo-Saxon puritanism. According to his biographer Fred Kaplan, Vidal “admired the President’s pragmatic intelligence, his powers of cold analysis, his self-serving ruthlessness” as well as his promiscuity. But Vidal and Bobby Kennedy grated on each other. Vidal considered RFK to be “rigidly Catholic,” grudge bearing, and intolerant. He sensed, correctly, that Bobby took a dim view of Vidal’s homosexuality.

  Vidal sat down at dinner next to Sue Roosevelt for what he later described as a “Mad Hatter evening.” Wandering into the Red Room, he exchanged sharp words with Janet Auchincloss, whom he detested. In the crowded Blue Room, he spotted Jackie sitting with a group of people. Leaning down to chat, he rested his arm against her back and shoulders. At that point Bobby Kennedy arrived. “He had been working late and he was feeling frustrated,” recalled Sue Roosevelt, who said he charged over to Vidal and removed his arm from Jackie’s back. Vidal followed him out of the room and growled, “Don’t ever do that again,” adding, “I’ve always thought that you were a god-damned impertinent son of a bitch.” Depending on the version, the two men told each other either to “get lost” or to “fuck off.” Vidal had an equally nasty spat with Lem Billings, who rebuked him for failing to attend an arts council meeting. “Gore went after him” with a string of insults, said George Plimpton. To cap off the evening, Vidal told Jack Kennedy, “I’d like to wring your brother’s neck.”

  Arthur Schlesinger recalled that “someone . . . perhaps Jacqueline Kennedy, asked me whether I would get [Vidal] out of there.” With the help of Galbraith and Plimpton, Arthur transported him back to the Madison Hotel. “Gore was having a terrible time,” said Plimpton. “He knew the die had been cast.” Although what Plimpton called “the bad Bobby, oversensitive and rude,” had been in evidence, Jack and Jackie pinned the blame on Vidal for all three contretemps. Vidal tried to justify himself the next day to Schlesinger, figuring he would be writing a history of the Kennedy years. Nevertheless, Schlesinger noted that Jackie was sufficiently “irritated” by Vidal’s behavior that she “resolved not to have him in the White House again.”

  Jack Kennedy had spent much of the evening strolling around, drinking minimally as usual, conversing with friends and family. (Only the Ambassador, Teddy, and Joan were absent; Joe Kennedy avoided such events, while Rose couldn’t get enough of them.) Anne Truitt’s husband, James, then a re
porter for the Washington Post, said Mary Meyer later told him that sometime during the dance Jack Kennedy had propositioned her but that she had rebuffed him.

  The Kennedys’ most intriguing official visitors in the fall of 1961 were Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s seventy-one-year-old prime minister, and his forty-three-year-old daughter, Indira Gandhi, who would become prime minister in 1966. As the prickly leader of a neutralist nation, Nehru was too cozy with the Soviet Union to suit Kennedy. The two men had previously met during JFK’s Asian tour in 1951, when Kennedy judged him “very intelligent” but “rather rude” and was irked by his vague answers. (“It’s like trying to grab something in your hand,” Kennedy said, “only to have it turn out to be just fog.”)

  Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, the widower Nehru had governed for nearly a quarter century with his only child as his hostess and confidante. Indira, who had gone to Oxford, was already an ambitious politician. Two years earlier she had been elected president of the Indian National Congress. Ken Galbraith had established good rapport with father and daughter, and had brought a message from the prime minister in late October inviting Jackie to visit India. Just before Nehru’s arrival in America, the Kennedys announced that Jackie would take up the invitations of both Ayub and Nehru to visit Pakistan and India at the end of November. At Jackie’s insistence, Lee would also make the trip.

  Nehru had asked that his first meeting with the President be informal, so Kennedy arranged a luncheon at Hammersmith Farm. While the two leaders talked policy, Jackie dined separately with Indira and Lem Billings. Nehru briefly showed “interest and vivacity” in Jackie’s presence, but he was remote and monosyllabic with Kennedy. Both Jackie and Billings found Indira surprisingly engaging; she avoided politics and spoke about her upbringing, even making jokes about herself. Afterwards, however, she acted grumpy and seemed resentful that she had been excluded from her father’s meeting. “Jack Kennedy did see Nehru at his worst, as a weary cynical man, and Indira was bitter and spiteful,” said Schlesinger.

  Flying from Rhode Island to Washington on Air Force One, Indira incongruously flipped through Vogue while Jackie read Malraux. Subsequent meetings between Kennedy and Nehru turned into “a brilliant monologue by the President,” said Galbraith. It took Jackie and Lee, who flanked Nehru at the White House dinner, to produce “the light of love in his eyes,” but afterwards Jackie told Galbraith she wished to postpone her trip. Indira continued to alienate various lunch and dinner partners with “wobbly and fuzzy leftist remarks about the United States.” Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger his meetings with the prime minister were “a disaster . . . the worst head-of-state visit I have had.”

  JFK did manage to inject some humor into the gloom, however. Lem Billings had considered his lunch with the prime minister’s daughter a success, so he was flattered when he received a flurry of phone messages from her while he was staying at Steve and Jean Smith’s in Georgetown. But every time he tried to reach her at Blair House, the President’s guest house near Lafayette Park, she was unavailable. Only later did Billings learn that “Madame Gandhi’s passion for his company” had been invented by Kennedy with the complicity of the White House switchboard.

  Once tensions over Berlin lessened after the construction of the wall, Kennedy faced a new international problem provoked by the Soviet Union’s resumption of atmospheric nuclear tests on September 1. In Vienna, Khrushchev had promised Kennedy he would not undertake any tests unless the United States did so. “That fucking liar,” Kennedy said to Steve Smith when he heard the news. Throughout the fall, the Soviets tested one atomic bomb after another—the most massive and dirty series ever—and Kennedy knew the United States had to resume testing as well.

  Yet Kennedy was actually feeling more sanguine about the relationship with the Soviets despite bluster on both sides about military dominance. The reason was an unusual correspondence Khrushchev had initiated in late September. Beginning with a twenty-six-page discursive letter sent through back channels, the secret correspondence would continue until Kennedy’s death—more than three hundred pages in all. Kennedy showed the contents only to a few top aides—Bundy, Rusk, and Bobby primarily. The letters did not modulate tough positions on either side, but they conveyed moods and intentions, and maintained an open channel intended to avoid misunderstanding or miscalculation in times of crisis.

  South Vietnam began to weigh on Kennedy as well. On returning from his Asian swing the previous May, Johnson had recommended significant U.S. aid and the use of American military personnel to train the South Vietnamese, although he balked at sending American troops. His observations about South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem’s aloofness from the populace were astute, but his overall report was too optimistic. Weeks later, during JFK’s talk with James Reston in Vienna, the Times correspondent noted that, almost as an afterthought, Kennedy spoke of a need to show American might to Moscow. “We have to confront them,” Kennedy said. “The only place we can do that is in Vietnam. We have to send more people there.”

  In the fall, Kennedy dispatched Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow on a second fact-finding mission. They reported that despite problems, the South Vietnamese army showed promise, and they recommended that American soldiers be deployed. Kennedy heard plenty of advice to the contrary. In a two-page single-spaced letter after a trip to Vietnam, Teddy White told the President that the situation there was “a real bastard to solve. . . . To commit troops there is unwise.” The President quoted White’s observations during a National Security Council meeting “much to the irritation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Arthur Schlesinger happily recounted. Galbraith issued another in a series of jeremiads, calling Vietnam “a can of snakes,” with the political situation in “total stasis” and Diem beyond hope of reform.

  For a variety of reasons—innate skepticism, the memories of French futility from his visit to Vietnam in 1951, a warning from General Douglas MacArthur against “a ground war in Asia,” the caution of such aides as Schlesinger and Galbraith—Kennedy decided to increase the number of military advisers instead of committing troops. Kennedy felt he couldn’t retreat in Asia, wrote Schlesinger, but he needed to buy time. Over the next eighteen months, incursions by Viet Cong guerrillas became less frequent, prompting Bob McNamara and other American visitors to report South Vietnamese progress. “Kennedy was stringing out Vietnam, hoping it would go away,” said Sidey.

  Later that fall Kennedy shook up his administration for the first time since the Bay of Pigs. In October he replaced sixty-eight-year-old Allen Dulles as director of the CIA with fifty-nine-year-old John McCone, a tough-minded Republican industrialist from California who had been under secretary of the air force in the Truman administration. The following month, Kennedy took aim at Chester Bowles—a marked man since his self-aggrandizing comments after the Bay of Pigs. During the summer Kennedy had tried to shift him out of the State Department by planting stories with Charley Bartlett and Joe Alsop that Bowles was in trouble. But Bowles alerted liberal allies who leaked word that “the first head to roll after the Cuban affair is the head of the man who opposed it.” Kennedy kept his man in place, “furious” at Bowles’s “very smart counterploy to keep his job. . . . The long knives are gleaming,” Stew Alsop told a friend.

  Since then, Bowles had found himself “more and more out of things,” wrote Galbraith in early November. “Bowles cannot make his decisions stick.” In a Thanksgiving weekend shuffle, Kennedy replaced Bowles with fifty-one-year-old George Ball, a lawyer with expertise in international economics, and gave Bowles the lofty-sounding title of “special adviser.” As usual, Kennedy couldn’t bring himself to fire Bowles, so he dispatched Ted Sorensen to tamp his anger and soothe his hurt feelings.

  Kennedy persisted in thinking the State Department was the weak link in his administration. Dean Rusk, fifty-two, displeased the President for failing to take firm stands on policy. To buttress Foggy Bottom’s “force and fertility of thought,” Kennedy moved in forty-five-year-old Walt
Rostow as head of policy planning. Rostow was a dedicated hawk, and such a strong proponent of counterinsurgency guerrillas that some called him “Chester Bowles with machine guns.” The plump and balding former MIT professor had fit in well as Mac Bundy’s deputy. But given his intellectual exuberance, Rostow wanted out from Bundy’s shadow, even if it meant leaving the West Wing.

  Fred Dutton, whose romance with his secretary was becoming awkward, was also transferred to State, as was Richard Goodwin, a fast and eloquent speechwriter who vexed Sorensen. Finally, as proof that the “vigah” of the Kennedy crowd wasn’t defined by years, the President appointed Averell Harriman as assistant secretary for the Far East. At age seventy, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union and Britain was so eager to have a role that he settled for a relatively low-ranking job. In part, Harriman was being rewarded for negotiating the still-shaky Laos neutrality agreement. But the veteran diplomat also got on well with Kennedy because of his “instinct for the care and feeding of presidents,” said Schlesinger.

  Kennedy remained “the supreme centre of power,” David Gore reported to Macmillan. The President was surrounded by “first class men,” but they were “clearly not yet able to take from his shoulders a single part of his tremendous burden”—in large measure because Kennedy didn’t want them to. Kennedy’s men were no longer “giddy with power” as they had been when the year began. Having “peered over the brink at nuclear warfare,” the British ambassador observed, they now seemed “less cavalier.” They were far from lugubrious, though, thriving on the hectic pace of their professional and social lives.