Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  The press picked up nothing about the contingency plans on Berlin and Cuba brewing in the White House. Kennedy appeared, as Time put it, the hard-working “summer bachelor . . . retiring to the deserted White House at dusk with sheaves of work under his arm.” The President visited his twenty-one-month-old son only once at Hammersmith Farm during Jackie’s trip to Italy. Kennedy insisted on staying in what his mother-in-law described as an “absolutely boiling hot” guest room. “He never complained,” she recalled. “He would come off the boat about 3 o’clock in the afternoon . . . and then he would sit there and work.”

  In mid-August he took a long weekend in Maine to sail on several large Coast Guard craft with a crew including Red Fay, Chuck Spalding, Jim Reed, and Peter Lawford. They stayed at the home of former world heavyweight champion Gene Tunney, a family friend, on John’s Island across from Boothbay Harbor. With Kennedy at the tiller, they sailed as far as Dark Harbor, some fifty miles away.

  JFK’s friends played their designated roles. Fay and Spalding supplied comic relief. Reed, now working as one of Doug Dillon’s deputies, provided substance as Kennedy quizzed him on the investment tax credit bill making its way through Congress. With so many problems to face, Kennedy appeared to enjoy talking about legislation that seemed certain to lift the economy.

  The following weekend Kennedy made a quick speechmaking jaunt out west, where he spent two afternoons at Peter Lawford’s place in Santa Monica. Bored with the tranquility of the Lawford pool, Kennedy suddenly bolted through the gate and onto the beach. He was surrounded by women as he plunged into the surf. (“They swooned when he swam,” wrote Time.) Just as Jackie was skimming across the Mediterranean waters “in perfect form on a single red and white ski,” her husband was photographed dripping wet in his bathing trunks with adoring fans clutching his arms. Kennedy “likes pleasure and women,” Hervé Alphand noted in his journal that week. “His desires are difficult to satisfy without causing concern for scandal and its use by his political adversaries. That might happen one day, since he doesn’t take sufficient precaution in this puritan country.”

  When Jackie rejoined her husband, Newport swarmed with friends on a succession of balmy September weekends—Vivian Crespi, Bill Walton, the Reeds, Gores, Roosevelts, and Fays. While in Ravello, Jackie had planned the guest lists, telling Jack, “if you want more special [sic] I can arrange it.” The one prominent absentee was Bradlee, who had irritated Kennedy with his comments to Fletcher Knebel for a Look magazine article in August about the President and the press.

  Bradlee had cited a phone call from JFK about a Newsweek story on the Morrissey federal judgeship nomination. “It’s almost impossible to write a story they like,” Bradlee told Knebel. “Even if a story is quite favorable to their side, they’ll find one paragraph to quibble with.” Bradlee’s candor about the Kennedy family requirement of “110 percent from their friends, especially their friends in the press” put him on ice for three months—from “dinner at the White House once and sometimes twice a week, and telephone calls as needed in either direction, to no contact.”

  Kennedy managed to carve out ten days in Newport starting in mid-September. The centerpiece of his holiday was the series of America’s Cup races that the Kennedys and their guests watched from the deck of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. destroyer. Although Jim and Jewel Reed were separated, they showed up together “to present the semblance of a marriage,” said Jewel. Jackie spent a long time one afternoon talking to Jim, which irked the Fays. “They were pumping Jim to find out what he and Jackie were talking about, but Jim was coy,” recalled Jewel.

  Ben Bradlee made a cameo appearance in a conspicuously nonsocial role when Kennedy summoned him to Newport for a “scoop.” A rumor had been circulating for more than a year that before meeting Jackie, JFK had been secretly married to a Palm Beach socialite named Durie Malcolm. Over the summer several right-wing periodicals had promoted the story, so Kennedy offered Bradlee FBI files that he could use on background to debunk the story and those who were disseminating it. Bradlee wrote his article, and Kennedy approved it, yet the chill persisted. David Gore spotted the Newsweek man and asked if he was coming to the races. “No,” Kennedy curtly interjected. “He’s not coming.”

  Dressed in a blue yachting blazer with brass buttons, Jack Kennedy peered through his binoculars at the twelve-meter sloop Weatherly defeating the America’s Cup challenge from Australia’s Gretel, while back in Washington the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation was being celebrated in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Not only did Kennedy’s absence from the ceremony fail to raise eyebrows, it was consistent with his hands-off approach to civil rights.

  His point man on the issue, Bobby Kennedy, sat on the platform with Arthur Schlesinger and Adlai Stevenson, who addressed the crowd of three thousand, calling individual freedom “the great unfinished business of the world today.” In a recorded message transmitted through loudspeakers and broadcast on nationwide radio and television, JFK sounded the same note as Stevenson, praising blacks for their “quiet and proud determination” and rejection of “extreme or violent policies” in their efforts to secure equality.

  On Monday, September 24, the last day of Jack’s vacation, he and Jackie hosted a lunch for Pakistani president Ayub Khan at Hammersmith Farm—as they had the previous year for his Indian counterpart. That evening Jackie flew with her husband to Washington for a two-night visit. Tuesday night featured a performance at the National Theater of Mr. President, a new Irving Berlin musical inspired by the Kennedy administration, with the $70,000 proceeds benefiting two mental retardation charities in memory of Jack’s brother Joe. The crowd numbered 1,600 of what the New York Times called “the political and social elite of Washington and New York.” Among the administration luminaries hosting pre-theater dinner parties were the Dillons, McNamaras, and Johnsons, who had the front of their house decorated to resemble a theater marquee. At the White House, the Kennedys entertained Rose, Bill Walton, Alice Longworth, and Carlos Sanz de Santamaria, the Colombian ambassador, and his wife.

  The real “Mr. President” was well aware that the musical starring Robert Ryan and Nanette Fabray had bombed during its Boston tryout. While Jackie and their guests went to the theater, Jack stayed behind to watch a heavyweight boxing match between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston on closed-circuit television. Broadway producer Leland Hayward delayed the curtain by a half hour as JFK’s new contoured red leather rocker sat empty in the presidential box. Kennedy didn’t show up until intermission at ten-thirty. He seemed to spend more time studying his program than watching the stage, turning at one point to ask Bill Walton, “Was the first act as bad as the second?” With a twist dance number, a song titled “The Secret Service Makes Me Nervous,” and a first lady riding a white sequined elephant, the show fell flat for the rest of the audience as well. “Dismal, corny, and hopelessly dated” was David Bruce’s verdict.

  The fun came after the final curtain, at a lavish midnight champagne supper dance for six hundred at the British Embassy, its terrace covered by a huge white silk tent decorated with gold braid, gold medallions, and ropes of hemlock and pine entwined with tiny white lights. Jack and Jackie sat at a table next to the dance floor with the Gores, Alphands, and de Santamarias.

  “Everyone ogled everyone,” Katie Louchheim recalled. A diamond tiara adorned Sissie’s hair, and Jackie wore an exquisite gown made of pink and gold brocade that had been given to her by King Saud of Saudi Arabia. She chose Hervé Alphand as her first dance partner, only to have Charlie Wrightsman cut in. Jack wandered and chatted as usual, although he took to the dance floor twice—with Eunice and Natalie Cushing, Fifi Fell’s daughter. David Bruce observed that both the President and First Lady “danced vigorously.”

  Even as Jack Kennedy’s standing with the electorate had dropped, “it was an evening to remove any remaining doubts that the magnetism of the Kennedys has become the hub of the social universe,” declared the Washington Post’s influential Maxine Ch
eshire. Jackie seemed eager to stay all night, but her husband took her hand at 2 a.m. They finally left thirty-five minutes later as many others “were still hot footing.” “The only thing that had intruded on a memorable night,” noted Time, “was that miserable play.”

  Marion “Mimi” Beardsley, a nineteen-year-old White House intern who began what she later described as “a sexual

  relationship” with JFK in June 1962.

  “Mimi had no skills. She couldn’t type. . . .

  She was a bright girl. . . . But she was

  not really a great asset to us.”

  In June 1962, artist Bernard LaMotte finishes painting scenes of St. Croix on the walls of the White House swimming pool, where JFK swam twice a day, often in the company of women on the West Wing staff.

  “The President . . . swam around with us, chatting to us about our jobs. . . . We were sipping wine while swimming, and all the while Powers was on the sidelines.”

  Jackie with her sister, Lee, and Gianni Agnelli on August 14, 1962, walking toward his yacht, the Agneta, for a cruise along the Amalfi coast.

  “I am having something you can never have the —absence of tension no —newspapers every day to make me mad. I wish so much I could give you that. . . . But I can’t give you that. So I give you every day while I think of you —the only thing I have to give & I hope it matters to you.”

  Jackie with Marella Agnelli at the base of one of the Greek temples at Paestum during a cruise on the Agneta on August 15, 1962.

  “The conversation was extremely light. . . . Jackie and Lee were on very good terms. It was a real vacation in a different place.”

  JFK on the Coast Guard yacht Manitou in Narragansett Bay with Countess Vivian Crespi (left) and Nuala Pell (far left),

  September 2, 1962.

  “Jack and I were great pals. He tried everything but I was never interested,

  because he wasn’t my type, but we always stayed very close friends. When he

  married Jackie I couldn’t believe he had the brains to choose her.”

  Jack Kennedy with his brother Teddy and a swarm of Kennedy children at the family compound on Cape Cod, September 3, 1962.

  “This was a man who all his life was at home with women and kids and human situations.”

  Robert McNamara and Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, both

  favorites of Jackie.

  “Men can’t understand [Bob’s] sex appeal.”

  Adlai Stevenson escorts Jackie to lunch in the delegates’ dining room at the United Nations on February 7, 1963.

  “There was real rapport between [Adlai] and Jackie. There was genuine affection. . . . They always kissed each other whenever they met.”

  Jackie arrives at the National

  Theater with Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Bill Walton for a benefit performance of Mr. President, the Irving Berlin musical,

  on September 25, 1962.

  “It was an evening to remove any remaining doubts that the magnetism of the Kennedys has become the hub of the social universe.”

  Jackie taking a jump while riding with the Middleburg Hunt in the autumn of 1962.

  “I do not consider myself a part of the Hunt Country life. I appreciate the way people there let me alone.”

  Jackie with André Malraux at the National Gallery of Art on January 8, 1963, to open the exhibit of the Mona Lisa, which the French minister of culture had promised to her

  the previous May.

  “She listened to him and wrote to him.

  Malraux was her prize.”

  Jackie at the Mona Lisa opening with the French ambassador, Hervé Alphand,

  and his wife, Nicole, only days before Charles de Gaulle rebuffed United States

  policies on nuclear weapons and British membership in the Common Market.

  “The French have now been consigned to the deepest recesses of the doghouse by the President.”

  JFK with Paul Fout at Wexford, the new Kennedy home in Virginia, designed by Jackie, in the spring of 1963.

  “It was a joke, that house. Jack didn’t want it. What was he going to do there?”

  At her farewell party on May 29,

  Tish Baldrige dances with J. B. West, the chief usher at the White House.

  “When the President said goodbye to me in

  his office, he told me I was the most emotional woman he’d ever known.”

  Jack, Jackie, and Janet Auchincloss attend a dance performance by Caroline’s class in the third-floor hallway outside the White House schoolroom on JFK’s forty-sixth birthday, May 29, 1963.

  “When people spoke [the Kennedy children] listened. They did not interrupt their elders.”

  JFK’s forty-sixth birthday party, a dinner cruise on the Potomac aboard the Sequoia on May 29, 1963. To the left of JFK: Martha Bartlett, Lem Billings, Anita Fay, Teddy Kennedy, and Hjordis Niven. To the right of JFK: Fifi Fell, Bobby Kennedy, and End Sztanko. In the foreground: British actor David Niven.

  “[Jack] chased me all around the boat. A couple of members of the crew were laughing. I was running and laughing as he chased me.”

  Jack Kennedy opening his birthday presents on the Sequoia. To the right of JFK: Red Fay, Jackie, and Fifi Fell (leaning over). To the left of JFK: Ethel Kennedy and Lem Billings (back to camera).

  “Kennedy ripped the wrappings of his presents with the speed and attention of a four-year-old child.”

  Jackie’s thirty-fourth birthday on July 28, 1963, celebrated aboard the Honey Fitz in Hyannis Port with friends and family, including (from left) Lem Billings, Steve Smith, Jean Smith, and Chuck Spalding. Two days earlier, JFK had announced agreement on a nuclear test-ban treaty.

  “I think you would like the novel I gave Jackie called The Fox in the Attic. It . . . has a haunting quality about it.”

  On Sunday, August 4, 1963, in Hyannis Port, JFK relaxes on the Honey Fitz with Red and Anita Fay. The previous day they had learned that Phil Graham, president and publisher of the Washington Post, had committed suicide.

  “Jack was as upset as everyone else, but we couldn’t dwell on it.”

  Jackie on the Honey Fitz on August 4, 1963. Three days

  later she would give birth

  prematurely to Patrick

  Bouvier Kennedy, who would die of complications from hyaline membrane disease after thirty-nine hours.

  “It is so hard for Jackie. After all

  the difficulties she has in bearing a child, to lose him is doubly hard. . . . It would have been

  nice to have another son.”

  Jackie’s longtime friend Nancy Tuckerman (left), Tish Baldrige’s replacement as social secretary, and Pamela Turnure, Jackie’s press secretary, bring flowers to the First Lady at the Otis Air Force Base hospital

  following the death of

  Patrick Kennedy.

  “[Nancy] was the opposite of me, quiet, soft-spoken, not a zealot. . . . Obviously Jackie welcomed a change from the overly strong dose of

  managing I had given her.”

  Jack and Jackie leave the Otis Air Force Base hospital on

  August 14, 1963.

  “The President’s anguish for

  his wife and their dead son gave August a melancholy cast.”

  Joe Kennedy celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday in Hyannis Port with his family on September 6, 1963. JFK is to the left. To the right: Sarge Shriver, Jean Smith, Bobby Kennedy, and Pat Lawford. Later in the evening, JFK sang “September Song.”

  “That was a killer, the old man in a wheelchair, the son singing. You almost felt Jack knew he wasn’t going to see old age.”

  JFK with (from left) Tony Bradlee, Ruth Pinchot, and Mary Meyer in Milford, Pennsylvania, on the front porch of the Pinchot home, September 24, 1963.

  “He was easy with both of us. There was no sexual thing evident. I always felt he liked me as much as Mary. You could say there was a little rivalry.”

  Jackie greets JFK on his arrival at Hammersmith Farm on September
12, 1963, to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary.

  “Without Jack as her husband, she told Charley, her life would have ‘all been a wasteland, and I would have known it every step of the way.’”

  On October 1, 1963, Jackie escorts the Ethiopian

  emperor, Haile Selassie, to a meeting with JFK in the Rose Garden, accompanied by Caroline (left) and a friend. The First Lady is wearing the full-length leopard coat that Selassie has just given to her.

  “See, Jack! He brought it to me! He brought it to me!”

  Jackie cruising the Aegean in

  October 1963 on the Christina, the luxurious yacht owned by the controversial Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis (standing, center). Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. is seated to the right.

  “I don’t think Jack wanted Jackie to go. I think he was appalled by it.”

  Lem Billings with Jack, Jackie, and John Jr. at Wexford on Sunday, October 27, 1963Billings’s last week-end with the Kennedys.

  “I got the feeling at the end that Jackie was trying to close Lem out.”

  The President and First Lady reviewing a

  performance by the Black Watch Regiment of bagpipers on the South Lawn, November 13, 1963eight days before their scheduled fundraising trip to Texas, Jackie’s first

  foray into the 1964 campaign.

  “She wanted to take a ‘pass’ on the Texas trip, citing the

  advice of her doctors. But Jack wanted her at his side.”

  On November 22, 1963, the presidential motorcade makes its slow progress through the streets of Dallas, Texas. Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie, are in the presidential limousine with the Kennedys.

  “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”