Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  The equal rights march turned out better than expected, both for Kennedy and for its organizers. Fearing violence, the President had initially tried to stop the march and then worked to use the event on behalf of the civil rights bill. The government chose the symbolic Lincoln Memorial as the setting, helped plan the program, and carefully coordinated security. The rally’s centerpiece was Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, calling for an America where individuals would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Afterwards, Kennedy invited the ten leaders of the march to the White House for tea, coffee, canapés, and sandwiches during an hour-long conference in which he praised “the deep fervor and quiet dignity” of the more than 200,000 demonstrators. Kennedy said that he had watched the speeches on television and admiringly told King that now he too had “a dream.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  With the announcement of her pregnancy in mid-April, Jackie had been freed from the usual springtime burden of official events, although she continued to participate selectively. On Thursday, May 2, she skipped a congressional wives’ brunch that she had committed to months earlier. JFK tried to make amends for her absence by cracking that she was “engaged in increasing the gross national product in her own way.” But Jackie’s telegram was “most frostily received. . . . In a room of 2,000 women they didn’t make much noise,” wrote Katie Louchheim. The reason for their displeasure was Jackie’s appearance—chronicled in all the newspapers—the evening before at a performance of the Royal Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

  She had already done her first lady turn that week by co-hosting a white-tie state dinner on April 30 for Charlotte, the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg—an event that originally had been intended for the previous October but was scuttled by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy was “very annoyed” at the prospect of entertaining royalty from such an insignificant country, and Chief of Protocol Angier “Angie” Biddle Duke had to persuade him, arguing that Roosevelt had sheltered the Grand Duchess after the Nazis had overrun her country in World War II. Kennedy “did go through it bravely and nobly,” Duke recalled. “But he certainly didn’t enjoy it much.”

  Among the important dinner guests was André Meyer, whom Jackie had met for the first time earlier that month at a small White House gathering. Meyer, a Wall Street financier, was a longtime client of Stéphane Boudin. “He was a great womanizer,” recalled Paul Manno, Boudin’s representative in New York. “Boudin and I went to see him and said, ‘How would you like to meet Jacqueline Kennedy?’ His eyes popped out of his head. I said, ‘It will only cost you $50,000.’ He said, ‘For what?’ I said, ‘For a rug.’” Meyer obediently purchased a nineteenth-century Savonnerie carpet coveted by Jackie to complete her beloved Blue Room, and the introduction followed. After the White House years, Meyer would become her confidant and financial adviser.

  The theme for the evening’s entertainment was Elizabethan poetry and music played on seventeenth-century instruments. Jackie selected sonnets and other works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne to be read by Basil Rathbone. As a surprise epilogue, she had the sonorous English actor recite the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V beloved by JFK. (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds blood with me shall be my brother.”) She told Rathbone that her husband “reminds me of [Henry V]—though I don’t think he knows that.” Against the strains of antique lutes, citterns, and virginals, the readings produced a “hushed melodic reflectiveness that stilled the listeners to a mood of intense concentration.”

  It was the second time Shakespeare had figured in a state dinner, and by then Kennedy’s penchant for quoting the Bard in his public appearances was well known. That spring Kennedy reeled off passages from Richard II, Henry IV, and King John. Journalists unabashedly admired such displays of erudition, although Kennedy stumped them at a fifty-first birthday party for Dave Powers in April with an inscription on a silver mug: “There are three things which are real: God, human folly and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension. So we must do what we can with the third.” Finally Tom Wicker of the New York Times discovered that the passage came from The Ramayana, as told by Hindu writer Aubrey Menen, and that Kennedy had rattled the words off from memory to his military aide Ted Clifton.

  Jackie’s next public appearance was her final one before she left for Cape Cod: a state dinner on June 3 for President Radhakrishnan of India with a performance of an excerpt from Mozart’s Magic Flute. After everyone was seated, Jackie came in “like a queen, but on cat’s feet,” commented Katie Louchheim. “All during dinner I caught her beautiful rapt look directed at the little old Indian president.”

  The dinner crowd was larger and more eclectic than usual. At JFK’s request, Schlesinger submitted a high-toned list of suggested guests—philosophers including Paul Weiss of Yale and Morton White of Harvard, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and various Indologists and writers such as Pearl Buck, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, and Nicholas Nabokov. At the same time, Kennedy reached out to Democratic contributors, mindful that the 1964 campaign was just over the horizon. Democratic party stalwart Katie Louchheim sent names to the President through Charley Bartlett. “The President gave the orders,” Louchheim wrote, “but how quickly is what amazed me.” Even Galbraith marveled that Kennedy was able to pay off “a phenomenal number of political debts.”

  Tish Baldrige left her post at the White House the following day—not “on a stretcher, because things have been so frantic,” as she predicted to her friend Clare Luce, but with copious tears despite her “last tense months.” “I really do love them with all my heart,” Baldrige told Luce, “and I feel as strongly as I have ever felt about anything that he is a great wonderful President.” Jackie gave Baldrige a warm send-off complete with champagne and the Marine Band playing as the staff sang “Arrivederci, Tish,” written by Jackie to the tune of “Arrivederci, Roma.” JFK spent fifteen minutes with Baldrige in the Oval Office, commenting that she was “the most emotional woman he’d ever known,” and thanking her for supporting Jackie so tirelessly.

  By then Jackie was well along with her last major White House restoration task. Almost a year had passed since she unveiled the redecorated room she described as a “gentleman’s library.” She had delegated Schlesinger to work with Yale University librarian James T. Babb as well as Bunny Mellon, an ardent bibliophile, to assemble 2,500 volumes by purchase or donation. But progress had stalled, at least in part because of Jackie’s uncertainty over what the library should be.

  In April, Jackie outlined her plan for a collection of “significant American” books “that have influenced American thinking,” such as the memoirs of Ulysses Grant and other presidents. Jackie wanted “old books in their bindings wherever possible,” but not “precious” first editions. By May 1963, Schlesinger produced a list with a suitable range, and Jackie promised to design a bookplate over the summer.

  Although Jackie had originally promised a “working library,” she balked at letting White House staff members borrow books. She worried that potential donors would think their books might be mistreated or stolen. Schlesinger finally turned her around by arguing, “there seems something a little sterile and artificial about a library which is not used.” Jackie decided to make borrowing privileges “tacit,” with someone on hand to supervise the circulation. “You can dress up in 18th century costume & sit there all day . . . reading Civil Disobedience,” she wrote Schlesinger.

  Jackie’s other project, the new house in Virginia, was completed by the end of May. Other than a few quick inspections with Jackie and various friends, Jack had given the place a wide berth. “It was a joke, that house,” said Ben Bradlee. “Jack didn’t want it. What was he going to do there?” The completed house was surprisingly modest and undistinguished. “There was not any size or scope,” said White House curator James Ketchum. “The sight lines were wonderful, though. That was its salvation.”


  Jackie spent just one night at Wexford that spring, bringing Mary Gallagher to help finish the furnishing. Jackie gave the decor exotic accents with carved elephants from Pakistan, handmade chairs and tables from India, and her collection of exquisite Indian Moghul miniatures that had previously been in the West Sitting Hall. “Jack never liked them,” she told Bill Walton. At Wexford, she hung them in the dining room. “Rather erotic,” sniffed Mary Gallagher, who found them more suitable for a bedroom.

  Gallagher was the guinea pig for the Wexford guest room, where vivid red, orange, and green paisley wallpaper covered not only the walls, but the ceiling and even the doors. When Jack Kennedy first saw the room, he likened it to “the inside of a Persian whorehouse.” Paul Fout was convinced that the dizzying decor was designed to discourage long visits. “They’re not going to like that ceiling,” he told Jackie. “I hope you’re right,” she said.

  Even before the house was finished, the Kennedys decided to lease it for the summer for $1,000 a month—“like renting your new mink jacket before you’ve even been seen in it,” noted one Washington columnist. Washington stockbroker A. Dana Hodgdon took the house from June through August, followed by San Diego oilman Ogden Armour, who leased until October 1.

  Once again the President and First Lady had arranged to spend their summer on Squaw Island, away from the Kennedy compound. This time they rented Brambletyde, a rambling gray shingled home belonging to wealthy Pennsylvania industrialist Louis Thun. Situated on a point of land, the house had panoramic ocean views. Jackie and the children were scheduled to arrive there on June 27, and as in previous years, they would move to Newport for the month of September. Financial problems had forced Jackie’s mother and stepfather to sell Merrywood and move to a considerably smaller Georgetown home in May. But Janet Auchincloss continued to live in high style at Hammersmith Farm and was eagerly planning a debutante ball in August for Jackie’s half sister Janet—an extravaganza for a thousand guests in a simulated Venetian garden with a thirty-foot red-and-black gondola brimming with flowers and the Meyer Davis orchestra dressed as gondoliers.

  Whatever had transpired between JFK and Mary Meyer at the dinner dance in March, she remained in Kennedy’s orbit. She had helped celebrate his birthday on the Sequoia, and after his American University speech on June 10, Kennedy had seen her at a Joe Alsop dinner party while Jackie was in the country. “The President . . . had said he’d like to come at the next to last minute,” Alsop wrote to Evangeline Bruce, “and then at the last minute, after a female had been procured from [sic] him, had a bit of bother with his back caused by his taxing weekend trip to Hawaii.” In the end, Kennedy opted to “come for a drink.” The “female” was doubtless Meyer; the other guests were David Bruce, diplomat William Attwood, Alice Longworth, David and Sissie Gore, Oatsie Leiter, Hugh and Antonia Fraser, Bob and Marg McNamara, and Oxford don Sir Maurice Bowra.

  Kennedy had been “in a gay mood” that late spring evening, engaging in the “persiflage about the Profumo case . . . and sensations still to be revealed.” Kennedy’s intended brief stop stretched to nearly an hour. It was during drinks in Alsop’s garden, with Meyer seated between himself and Attwood, that Kennedy reminisced about the first time he had danced with her at Choate nearly three decades earlier. But the President also had time for a colloquy with the lovely thirty-year-old Antonia Fraser. As Alsop told Evangeline Bruce, he looked “rather like a small boy wondering whether to plunge a spoon into a fresh dish of peach ice cream.”

  Two nights later, on Wednesday, June 12, Meyer was back in the White House for dinner with Jack, Jackie, Red Fay, and Bill Walton. Among other topics, they discussed Ros Gilpatric’s planned exit from government to resume his law practice in New York. Kennedy once jokingly speculated to Ben Bradlee that the handsome and charming deputy secretary of defense might be the administration’s “hidden Profumo.” Jackie had recently spent the day with Gilpatric at his farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “You could tell how constrained she was,” Gilpatric recalled, “how much she wanted to break loose and yet how concerned she was about her image, how determined she was not to embarrass her husband.” In Jackie’s farewell letter to “dear Ros,” written on June 13, she said that his departure would leave “a real void.” Jackie spent the following night at Camp David, and Mary Meyer spent yet another evening with JFK at the White House.

  Kennedy was set to leave on June 22 for a ten-day trip to Europe. His aim was to strengthen the Atlantic alliance by visiting Germany and Italy, and to indulge in some sentimental travel in Ireland. He purposely omitted France after de Gaulle blackballed Britain from the Common Market. At the same time he arranged a twenty-four-hour visit to Britain that he wanted to keep secret as long as possible to avoid inflaming the French. “The declared purpose for it could be thought up at the time depending on what was happening in the world,” David Gore told Macmillan after a strategy session with JFK on May 3. To downplay the visit, which was announced in early June, Macmillan suggested that they meet at his country home, Birch Grove, rather than London.

  Since Kennedy was then awaiting Khrushchev’s reply to the Peace Speech, he wanted to discuss strategy for the test-ban treaty negotiations due to begin several weeks later. But JFK also sought to bolster Macmillan, who was reeling from continued revelations in the Profumo affair. The Tory government’s problems had intensified with Profumo’s disclosure on June 4 that in March he had lied to the House of Commons when he denied sexual intimacy with Christine Keeler. Macmillan told Parliament that he had been “grossly deceived” by his war minister. Censured by his peers, Profumo left public life in disgrace—largely because “the telling of such a falsehood in the House is considered even more serious than cheating at cards in a gentleman’s club,” noted American ambassador David Bruce. In a telegram to Kennedy on June 18, Bruce described Macmillan’s admission of ignorance as “pitiable and extremely damaging.” That day in an Oval Office meeting with August Heckscher, Kennedy marveled that Macmillan had been in the dark about the affair. “But as a matter of fact, of course, nobody ever told me what was going on,” said Kennedy. “But then, the CIA never does tell me anything.”

  Four days later, Bruce sent JFK an “eyes only” memo describing the “current gossip” about the Profumo affair as “of a variety and virulence almost inconceivable. I shall speak to you about some of it when I see you. Thus far, no American government official has, to my knowledge, been involved in these speculations and accusations, nor have I reason to believe any will become so unless by innuendo.” From the moment the Profumo scandal broke, Kennedy “had devoured every word,” according to Ben Bradlee. “It combined so many of the things that interested him: low doings in high places, the British nobility, sex, and spying.”

  Still, Kennedy was “very depressed,” Jackie recalled, about the impact on Macmillan—“the prospect of what he considered to be a great hero brought down.” As a special gesture, JFK arranged to give Macmillan’s wife, Dorothy, “a golden dressing table set with her initials on it.”

  Planning for the trip included the transport of what Macmillan described as Kennedy’s “specially constructed bed . . . on which he alone could get comfort.” Mac Bundy and Philip de Zulueta, Macmillan’s private secretary, spent a week arranging to install the double bed for Kennedy’s one night at Birch Grove.

  Jackie “wished to make every detail perfect” for her husband’s journey, and involved herself extensively in the logistics. Writing to Dorothy Macmillan on the eve of JFK’s departure, Jackie expressed dismay that the White House chef had sent elaborate instructions for the Birch Grove visit. “Please think of Jack as someone David Gore is bringing down for lunch,” Jackie wrote, “and just do whatever you would do in your own house—His tastes are distressingly normal—plain food—children’s food—good food—He likes anything.”

  Kennedy prepared himself with the usual complement of briefing papers. Schlesinger weighed in against the “banality and vapidity” of drafts by State Depar
tment analysts and continued to criticize Rusk for his conventional thinking and bland personality that resulted in “authority but not command.” The historian also wisely cautioned Kennedy against publicly advocating the multinational nuclear force. Sorensen was working overtime to prepare no fewer than twenty-seven public statements and speeches for his boss and girding himself for a succession of sleepless nights. At Schlesinger’s suggestion, Kennedy assigned Mac Bundy to share the speechwriting burden.

  Days before his departure, JFK summoned Enüd Sztanko to the White House to critique some German phrases he planned to use at the Berlin wall. “The pronunciation is terrible,” she told him. “I had him repeat the phrases ten times, and I corrected his pronunciation.” Although they were alone in the private quarters, Kennedy “behaved impeccably. He was like a little boy and said, ‘See, I’ve been good.’”

  Some in the press raised questions about the need for a European trip in light of more pressing domestic problems. Even David Gore warned his superiors on June 20 about the “unpropitious” timing. Kennedy, he said, would be “leaving behind a disquieting internal situation. . . . The racial crisis has reached in places an explosive stage,” with talk among Negro leaders of “large-scale civil disobedience . . . nationwide.” Gore noted a “marked lack of enthusiasm here for the President’s journey.” A Harris poll taken just before Kennedy’s departure bore out Gore’s instincts: JFK’s popularity registered at 59 percent—a sharp drop from his high of 75 percent after the missile crisis. Harris blamed the decline on the “boiling civil rights crisis.”