Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Graham turned abusive to colleagues, employees, and even the President. When JFK called him in November, Graham unleashed an angry outburst that Kennedy patiently endured. Walt Rostow was impressed that in a White House meeting several weeks later when Graham was “quite wild,” Kennedy “did the best to treat him with dignity but calm him down.”

  During a trip to Paris late in 1962, Graham met a young Australian reporter named Robin Webb in the Newsweek bureau there. Graham became infatuated with Webb and brought her back to New York, where they moved into a suite at the Carlyle. His mood aggravated by excessive drinking, Phil confronted Katharine with his affair and walked out in mid-January. He and Robin flew out west, ending up in Phoenix, where a group of newspaper publishers and editors on the Associated Press board were having a conference at the Biltmore Hotel. Graham “was in a high mood, cursing a lot,” recalled Otis Chandler, the Los Angeles Times publisher who took the cottage next to Graham’s.

  On Thursday, January 17, Graham called the Oval Office at 7:30 p.m. Arizona time—three hours after JFK had left the office—and spoke with Evelyn Lincoln. Graham “wanted me to ask Curtis LeMay to call him,” Lincoln noted in her diary. “He said he was in love with Robin Webb and was going to get married to her as soon as he got a divorce. He sounded drunk to me.”

  That evening Graham went to dinner with the newsmen. As soon as Ben McKelway, editor of the Washington Star, the Post’s rival in the capital, stood up to speak, Graham walked to the lectern, seized the microphone, and began shouting insults at various publishers in the room. Chandler made his way to the podium and escorted Graham back to his cottage, where Webb tried to settle him. Well past midnight Graham called Jack Kennedy to continue his tirade. Banging on Chandler’s door, Graham implored him to talk to “his buddy” the President.

  By then Chandler had reached the president of the Washington Post television stations, also in Phoenix for a meeting, to report, “Phil is out of control. You’d better get him out of here.” The Post executive called Katharine Graham. She desperately contacted James Truitt, who phoned Jack Kennedy. The President immediately dispatched Phil’s psychiatrist to Phoenix in an air force plane.

  In later years, there were persistent rumors that Graham had shocked the gathering by telling them “who in Washington was sleeping with whom,” including Kennedy and his “favorite,” Mary Meyer. Yet two men in the audience could remember no such revelation. Bernard Ridder, publisher of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, vividly recalled Graham’s “rude and critical” remarks, and Otis Chandler remembered that “Phil was roaming from one subject to another, and he was not making sense. There was stone silence in the room. He didn’t talk that long. Phil’s utterances were of nonconnecting thoughts and four-letter words.”

  After being tranquilized and restrained by physicians, Graham was hospitalized for several weeks and resigned from COMSAT. In a letter of gratitude to Jack Kennedy, Katharine wrote that her husband “would die at the thought that he might have hurt you in any way. I hope he didn’t—too much.” The reference had to do with Graham’s conduct rather than any specific statement. “No one present that night has ever told me exactly what happened or what Phil said,” Katharine Graham wrote years later. She knew only that her husband’s “wild remarks” had attacked individuals, but she never heard any mention of Mary Meyer.

  “We heard Phil flipped out,” said Ben Bradlee. “All the drama was Phil going crazy. Mary Meyer wasn’t talked about, not at all. If Tony had heard that, she obviously would have talked to Mary.” Added Anne Truitt, “James would have told me if Phil had mentioned Mary. It would have worried him terribly.” Katie Louchheim, who had few inhibitions about passing along the latest scuttlebutt, wrote to a friend only that Phil Graham was “the story of the week,” describing his behavior but saying nothing of sexual allegations about JFK. Eleven days after Graham’s breakdown, Meyer was at the White House for the evening while Jackie was at Glen Ora.

  Graham had barely been released from the Chestnut Lodge psychiatric hospital when he was back in New York at the Carlyle with Webb. Shortly after JFK arrived in his thirty-fourth-floor suite on Saturday, February 9, for the weekend with Jackie, Lee, Stas, and Spalding, he stopped by Graham’s suite for twenty minutes. When he returned to his apartment, Kennedy inadvertently left behind his briefcase—a reflection of what one author called his lifelong habit of “peculiar absentmindedness . . . always leaving clothes, briefcases or papers behind in hotels or airports or on trains.”

  In a burst of grandiosity, Graham told friends that he had seen classified papers. When Tony Bradlee asked about Graham’s claim, JFK explained that it was “hardly a briefcase of ‘national crises’ . . . just a “bunch of documents.” Holding his thumb next to his forefinger, JFK said, “The line is so damn narrow between rationality and irrationality in Phil. . . . He has been good to me and good to this country, and I want to help him out.” Graham was beyond anyone’s help by then. Shortly after his visit with Kennedy, he and Webb took off on a trip to the Caribbean and Europe, not to return until early summer.

  Jackie betrayed no change in attitude toward the Bradlees to signal she knew about Jack and Mary. The only hiccough in their relationship occurred in March when Ben revealed to the Kennedys over dinner that he had been keeping a journal of their conversations. He had not intended to tell them, but Tony forced him to. Ben assured JFK that he “would not write anything about him as long as he was alive without his permission.” Kennedy was unfazed. “He insisted that he was glad that someone was keeping some kind of a record of the more intimate details without which the real story of any administration cannot be told,” Bradlee recorded that evening. “I am not convinced he knows how intimate those details might get, but I suspect Jackie does.”

  On Friday, March 8, the Kennedys had their sixth and what would be their final dinner dance at the White House. The honoree was Eugene Black, the director of the World Bank, who didn’t understand his role as front man and insisted the Kennedys invite a large group of his friends. As a result, the Kennedys had to “uninvite” old friends as they had done previously when their dinners were oversubscribed. Once again, the Bradlees, Bill Walton, Arkady Gerney, and Mary Meyer were among those who had to dine elsewhere before the 10 p.m. dance.

  During dinner in the Blue Room, a dozen violinists played “gently and wildly Viennese and Hungarian music,” Adlai Stevenson told Marietta Tree. The Red and Green Rooms were illuminated by fireplaces and soft lighting, and when the Blue Room was cleared for dancing to Lester Lanin, “the lights were shut off and the gayety [sic], enhanced by a large number of younger people who arrived after dinner, proceeded far into the morning lit by only a few candles around the walls.”

  Ninety-four guests consumed “only” thirty-three bottles of champagne and six bottles of hard liquor, Kennedy later reported. But spirits were giddy nevertheless. The girlfriend of Godfrey McHugh, Kennedy’s soigné air force aide, was reported to have taken a swim at midnight and to have jumped on the bed in the Lincoln Room—a story Jackie recounted several days later and Jack didn’t deny. Lyndon Johnson “spent a large portion of the evening floating in the capacious embrace” of New York beauty Lilly Guest. At 3 a.m., Stevenson was surprised to encounter Marian Schlesinger “quite high and very affectionate.” In the car on the way home he witnessed “curiously daring behavior by Phyllis Dillon in a dim corner of her car.”

  Kennedy had a comical run-in with the Earl of Arran, a journalist known as “Boofy” Gore who was a cousin of the British ambassador. (Gore was famous in the House of Lords for advocating the rights of homosexuals and the protection of badgers, proclaiming, “I want to stop them from badgering the buggers and buggering the badgers.”) He made the mistake of bringing up the Skybolt imbroglio, causing Kennedy to shout, “Where’s McNamara?” “A simply terrifying-looking man came up,” the journalist later wrote. McNamara assaulted him with facts and figures, and when he stopped, Kennedy took over. “It was like a Greek chorus,” wr
ote Gore.

  Although Kennedy appeared to be in a “lighthearted mood” at the dance, something went awry with Mary Meyer that night. Her date for the evening was Blair Clark, JFK’s old friend from Harvard. Despite the chill in the air, Meyer decided to wear a wispy dress that had belonged to her great-grandmother, which she instantly realized was a mistake. At some point in the evening, Meyer “simply disappeared for a half hour,” Clark told author Ralph Martin six years after James Truitt disclosed the Kennedy-Meyer affair. “Finally I went looking for her. She had been upstairs with Jack, and then she had gone walking out in the snow. So there I was, ‘the beard’ for Mary Meyer.”

  Tony Bradlee remembered “people talking about ‘Where was Mary?’ It was long enough so you would notice her absence.” Later Meyer told Anne Truitt only that she had been “unhappy,” and that when she came inside she couldn’t find Clark. Bobby Kennedy called a White House limousine, put her in the back, and sent her home. “Mary said Bobby had been nice to her,” recalled Cicely Angleton. “She was upset, and he saw that she got home safely.”

  Whether Kennedy tried to break it off with Meyer that night is unknown. But a stray remark he made to Bradlee may offer a clue. Surveying the “females imported from New York,” Kennedy said, “If you and I could only run wild, Benjy.” Jackie startled Adlai Stevenson, her dinner partner, by confiding that she and Lee had “always talked about divorce as practically something to look forward to,” and that “I first loved you” when she and Stevenson met back in Illinois just after she and Jack were married. Jackie may have been indulging in her known tendency to exaggerate for effect. But, more revealingly, she told Stevenson, “I don’t care how many girls [Jack sleeps with] as long as I know he knows it’s wrong, and I think he does now. Anyway that’s all over, for the present.”

  Kennedy’s amorous adventures were becoming more widely known within the intelligence community. In addition to the likelihood that J. Edgar Hoover was passing information to LBJ from the growing FBI dossier on JFK, there were rumors in later years that CIA spymaster James Angleton had learned about Kennedy’s affair with Meyer by tapping her phones. His widow, Cicely, dismissed that notion as “the nuttiest thing.” Although Cicely was one of Meyer’s closest friends, she was unaware of the affair with Kennedy. “I took it for granted that as a wonderful charming woman naturally she would be going to the White House,” said Cicely. Yet Richard Helms said James Angleton had “indicated a knowledge of Mary Meyer and Jack Kennedy. I don’t know how or where he got it. He had no capacity to tap her phone.”

  Helen Chavchavadze had also come under scrutiny, and by March 1963, she began to suffer the consequences. Since 1961 she had been studying for her master’s degree in Russian at Georgetown and earning money by teaching English as a second language there. She had completed her master’s thesis in the fall of 1962 and was accepted at the Foreign Service Institute as a supervisory linguist. But although she had graduated at the top of her class and received glowing recommendations, she was unable to start work because her security clearance had not come through.

  In January 1963 her interviews began with State Department security officers. “They were interrogating me about my life, asking questions about abortions I had had,” she recalled. “They had a dossier, and they were asking if I believed in free love. I had two children to support, and I couldn’t get a security clearance.” Chavchavadze soon began to sense that her house was under surveillance. She knew that Jack had to be the key factor in her problems; when she lived in Berlin, she had received a security clearance as a contract translator for the CIA, where her then husband worked.

  Chavchavadze went swimming at the White House with Jack at lunchtime one day in early 1963. “You look like a frightened rabbit,” he said to her. “I was about to crack,” she recalled. “I was paranoid about all those interviews.” A day or so later, a limousine arrived at her Georgetown home, and a chauffeur handed her an envelope containing $500 in cash (the equivalent of $3,000 today). “It was obviously from Jack,” she said. “He did something. It wasn’t much. He was worried for me.”

  Kennedy interceded with the State Department to grant Chavchavadze permission to start work in April. But her lack of a clearance prevented her from attending meetings, which she found humiliating. She became depressed, unable to concentrate or read, and she quit. Shortly afterwards she had a nervous breakdown and checked herself into the new psychiatric ward on the seventh floor of Washington’s Sibley Hospital.

  She was surprised to have regular visits from Ted Sorensen, whom she had met at the home of Washington hostess and health care activist Florence Mahoney. “I think he was interested in me as a woman,” Chavchavadze recalled. “But I sort of wondered if he was concerned that I might be saying something too.” She had lost her house, and her two daughters had been sent to live with their grandmother on Cape Cod. But the greatest pressure was what Chavchavadze called “the conspiracy of silence”—her inability to discuss her affair. “It was one of the many aspects that were the cause of my crack-up,” she later said. “It was stressful, on top of the whole thing with the clearance.”

  As Jackie’s pregnancy advanced, her official appearances dwindled. In March she attended just two White House functions—a noontime White House reception for the American National Theatre and Academy, and a state dinner for dashing young King Hassan II of Morocco. Both Jack and Jackie were enchanted by Hassan, who gave the President a gold sword encrusted with fifty diamonds. Jackie wrote the king a five-page letter in French and told the Bradlees that if she could visit anywhere in the world, it would be Morocco.

  Jackie dropped a few tantalizing hints among friends about her condition. At the Eugene Black dinner she had rattled Tony Bradlee by announcing “my bust is bigger than yours, but then so is my waist.” Three weeks later at dinner Ben had asked Jackie if she was expecting. She denied it, but the Bradlees remained unconvinced. Jackie’s unwillingness to confide in them upset Tony, though less so when she learned that Janet Auchincloss had also been kept in the dark.

  With riding horses out of the question, Jackie devoted herself to decorating Wexford, mostly with furniture she had used in the Georgetown house. By April 1 the family had moved out of Glen Ora. Until the new house was ready, they spent their spring weekends at Camp David. Jackie used the presidential retreat as a jumping-off point for two excursions to Civil War battlefields—first in Jack’s convertible to Gettysburg with Paul and Anita Fay, and a week later to Antietam by helicopter with Lem Billings, Jim Reed, and Ralph “Rip” Horton, a Choate friend who was serving as special assistant to the secretary of the army.

  When the group returned to Camp David that Sunday, Reed and Jackie had a deeply personal conversation. “I was getting divorced from my wife, and Jackie asked me all kinds of questions: why I was divorcing Jewel, what did I think of Jewel, probing questions,” Reed recalled. “She knew I knew that Jack was doing various things he shouldn’t have done. That wasn’t the issue. We were talking about intimacy. She was forthright with me about her relationship with Jack. They did have a sex life. She talked about that intimately with me. She loved him dearly, and I felt they were getting much closer together.” Reed was neither shocked nor judgmental about Jackie’s frankness. “I rather enjoyed it,” he said. “I knew her pretty well. I never got any girls for Jack, and she felt I was not contributing to the delinquency of the President.” Reed was struck, however, that “Jackie was genuinely sorry I was going through [the divorce] experience. There was a lot of kindness and gentleness in Jackie.”

  The following Wednesday, Jackie and the children flew to Palm Beach for Easter vacation at the Paul residence. When JFK arrived the next day with the Fay family, the press had an unusual glimpse of the closeness between Jack and Jackie that Reed had detected. Jackie “waited for her husband at a spot well out of the range of news cameramen,” the Washington Post reported, “and gave him a big hug and kiss when he stepped from the jet.”

  On Worth Avenue, JFK b
ought Lilly Pulitzer dresses for Jackie and Caroline, and he interrupted a Honey Fitz cruise on the afternoon of Easter Sunday to flag down a catamaran called Pattycake. With Fay at his side, Kennedy jumped aboard and asked if he could take the tiller. Dressed in his sporty red trousers, the President stood barefoot on the deck, clamped a cigar between his teeth, and sailed the craft around Lake Worth.

  The next day, Monday, April 15, Jackie announced that she would have a baby at the end of August. The birth would be the first for a presidential couple since Marion Cleveland was born in 1895. Jackie would cease her official schedule and spend most of her time away from the White House, remaining in Palm Beach for ten more days and moving to Cape Cod at the end of May. As so often happened in the fecund Kennedy family, Jackie was not alone. Joan was expecting her third child in August and Ethel was preparing for her eighth in June.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Jack Kennedy’s upbeat mood in the early months of 1963 was rooted in more than happiness over the prospect of a third child. For the first time in two years, he felt optimistic about the world situation. His new tone came through clearly in his State of the Union address on Monday, January 14. Sitting in the gallery, Katie Louchheim thrilled to the “theatrical quality of grandeur” and the vision of Kennedy as a “hard-muscled man with a neat hero’s look, and a way of taking it in but not letting himself be taken in by it.” She watched him glance at John McCormack and Lyndon Johnson “not with deference but with political respect.” The President’s reading was “flat,” yet he communicated “beyond words. . . . He leaves it to you, and so you listen carefully.”

  The centerpiece of his address was the proposed $13.5 billion tax reduction to stimulate economic growth and reduce unemployment, which had exceeded 5 percent in sixty-one of the previous sixty-two months. But his words also highlighted a receding Soviet threat following the missile crisis. In Kennedy’s first State of the Union, he had solemnly declared that “the tide of events has been running out and time has not been our friend. . . . The news will be worse before it is better.” Now he proclaimed the United States had “the tides of human freedom in our favor . . . We have every reason to believe that our tide is running strong.” Specifically, the possibility of peaceful compromise with the Soviet Union seemed within reach. James Reston concluded that in two years Kennedy had turned from pessimistic to “buoyantly hopeful.”