Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  The trip aboard the “brilliantly lighted ship . . . gay with guests, good food and drinks” sparked criticism in the press and from Kennedy’s political opponents. Republican national chairman William E. Miller attacked the Kennedy administration’s “lack of decorum and dignity,” citing “late night parties in foreign lands.” Republican congressman Oliver Bolton of Ohio denounced both Jackie and Roosevelt for consorting with Onassis. Even the Washington Post weighed in. When word reached the White House that the newspaper planned to run an editorial criticizing Roosevelt’s conflict of interest, JFK asked Mac Bundy to call Katharine Graham, who had succeeded her husband as president of the Post in late September, and request that the editorial not run. She dutifully spoke to editor Russ Wiggins, but he ran it anyway.

  Instead of cutting her trip short, Jackie added a second leg to Morocco, a place she had longed to visit as much as Jack had yearned for Ireland. She and Lee were invited by King Hassan II, returning the Kennedys’ hospitality the previous March. The two sisters spent three days in the king’s Bahia Palace in a suite decorated with white leather Moroccan and modern furniture, overlooking groves of palm trees and the Atlas Mountains. Servants in white robes and red fezzes offered them dates on brass trays and milk poured from silver ladles, and the king flew in two hairdressers and a manicurist. Jackie and Lee slept late and prowled the bazaars for exotic goods.

  One afternoon, as they waited for the king, they met “almost one hundred smiling and giggling ladies dressed in golden caftans”—the harem of Hassan’s late father and grandfather. When they had exhausted all conversational possibilities, Jackie announced that Lee would sing “In an Old Dutch Garden Where the Tulips Grow” and “The White Cliffs of Dover.” Lee’s predicament sent Jackie into “hysterical laughter.”

  In Jackie’s absence—what Manchester later described as “a strange hiatus between tragedy and tragedy”—JFK took Caroline and John to Camp David on weekends and entertained his father at the White House. Kennedy scarcely socialized on his own. One evening he invited Vivian Crespi, Red Fay, and Teddy for supper. “Jack wanted to show me some Christmas presents he wanted to buy for Jackie,” Crespi recalled. “He knew I knew her taste.”

  Another Christmas surprise he planned for Jackie was a new proficiency in French after secret lessons from Jacqueline Hirsh, a teacher Jackie had hired to enrich the curriculum at the White House school. During their four sessions together Kennedy “kept interrupting,” Hirsh recalled, “constantly asking questions.” She was struck that the President “seemed extremely self conscious, extremely. He kept fiddling with his tie and getting up and sitting down.” When Hirsh asked him why he was so eager to “surprise the world,” he said “Well, it’s always good to improve anything you know.”

  For four days photographer Stanley Tretick was given free access to snap nearly a thousand pictures of Kennedy and his children in the White House and at Camp David—intrusions ordinarily frowned on by Jackie. The resulting photo spread in Look featured a memorable series of John Jr. peeking from under his father’s desk and perched on the presidential rocking chair. During the photo shoots, Tretick’s colleague Laura Bergquist found Kennedy to be unusually remote. “There wasn’t the lighthearted banter, the fun and games of our early sessions with him,” she said. “This was a very sober preoccupied man who was obviously beginning to look middle aged.”

  Jim Reed sensed the same mood at the state dinner for Irish prime minister Sean Lemass on Tuesday, October 15. Jean Smith filled in as hostess, and Kennedy organized the evening’s entertainment of Air Force Bagpipers in “traditional Irish saffron kilts.” The guest list was overwhelmingly Irish American. Dancer Gene Kelly called it a “four handkerchief evening,” having “cried at every Irish tune.” Afterwards Kennedy invited some fifteen guests upstairs for more music by bagpipers and violinists. Gene Kelly danced, and Kennedy family friend Dorothy Tubridy sang “The Boys of Wexford.” “She sang it well, but it is a very sad song,” Reed recalled. “I watched the President in the doorway by himself. It was a touching, poignant picture. I had never seen him that way. It was the only time I could remember a sadness that came across his countenance.”

  Jackie came home on Thursday night, “suntanned but exhausted,” noted chief usher J. B. West. She and the children went to Wexford for the weekend, while Jack headed to New England. Kennedy’s visit was as nostalgic as it was political. With Powers, O’Donnell, and O’Brien he watched the Harvard-Columbia football game but left at halftime. “I want to go to Patrick’s grave,” he said. For twenty minutes he stood at the headstone inscribed only with KENNEDY. “He seems so alone here,” JFK finally said. After a butterscotch sundae with Powers at a nearby Schrafft’s restaurant, Kennedy and his aides walked back to their hotel to prepare for the evening’s event, a fundraiser for six thousand of the party faithful in Boston’s Commonwealth Armory. “People were swarming around him,” recalled historian James MacGregor Burns. “There was that smiling, live, electric figure. . . . It was family night in Boston, with lots of the old retainers and supporters around, including myself.”

  For one member of his entourage, Mimi Beardsley, it was her last presidential trip. Instead of returning to Wheaton College that September, she had been so “enthralled” by the White House, recalled her schoolmate Wendy Taylor, that she had stayed on. Beardsley left the White House shortly afterwards to prepare for her wedding to Williams graduate Anthony Fahnestock. “My mother said, ‘You are coming home,’” Beardsley recalled. Beardsley and Fahnestock later divorced, and she finally received her bachelor’s degree four decades after she dropped out. In May 2003, when she was working as an administrator at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, a long-sealed oral history at the Kennedy Library in Boston revealed her affair with Kennedy, prompting her to break her decades-long public silence and admit that “from June 1962 to November 1963 I was involved in a sexual relationship with President Kennedy.” As a sixty-year-old grandmother of four, she described her disclosure as a “relief” and a “gift” to share finally with her two married daughters.

  On Sunday, October 20, Kennedy traveled to Hyannis to cruise on the Marlin and visit with his father. As he left in his helicopter Monday morning, he kissed the old man not once but twice. Glancing back at his father in a wheelchair on the porch, Kennedy said to Powers, “He’s the one who made all this possible, and look at him now.”

  Kennedy returned to his native Massachusetts one final time the following Saturday to dedicate the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College. The poet had died the previous January at age eighty-eight. At the time of his death, he and Kennedy had been estranged as a result of Frost’s remarks on American weakness after visiting the Soviet Union. When Frost fell ill in December 1962, it was front-page news. Telegrams poured in from around the world, but no word came from the White House. “Frost was deeply offended that Kennedy hadn’t communicated with him,” said Stewart Udall, Frost’s close friend. “I was unhappy. I thought it was cold and unfeeling.”

  Nevertheless, Kennedy remained a great admirer of Frost’s work and decided to honor him. Flying to Amherst on Saturday, October 26, Kennedy worked over remarks written by Arthur Schlesinger for the Frost dedication. Udall warned Kennedy that Leslie Frost was furious about the President’s snub at the end of her father’s life. “Is there going to be a fuss?” Kennedy inquired. “I don’t think so,” Udall replied. “But if you see me wrestling on the ground with a woman you’ll know she’s there.” Replied JFK, “Whatever you do, Stewart, we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

  Kennedy’s speech was one of his finest, a meditation on the role of the artist in a civilized society. He called Frost “one of the granite figures of our time in America,” and observed that “because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair.” Kennedy admired Frost for coupling “poetry and power, for he saw poetr
y as the means of saving power from itself. . . . When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. . . . I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. . . . I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.”

  THIRTY

  The same day that Jack Kennedy spoke of the cleansing power of poetry, a tawdry political scandal rocked the administration. Investigative reporter Clark Mollenhoff had sniffed out the mysterious deportation of Ellen Rometsch and had written an article in the Des Moines Register headlined “U.S. Expels Girl Linked to Officials.” The “part-time model and party girl” had been associating with “prominent New Frontiersmen from the executive branch of the government.” The Washington Post simultaneously broke a story describing the activities of Bobby Baker’s Quorum Club on Capitol Hill, and on Sunday, October 27, ran an even more incendiary account based on the Mollenhoff revelations under the headline “Hill Probe May Take Profumo-Type Twist.”

  The Post promised “a spicy tale of political intrigue and high level bedroom antics” involving the still unnamed Rometsch in an “upcoming Senate probe of its employees’ extracurricular activities.” On Tuesday the twenty-ninth, Republican senator John J. Williams of Delaware would be holding a closed-door session of the Senate Rules Committee to hear testimony on “an extremely sensitive and dangerous matter” involving “a 27 year old German woman of alluring physical proportions and some offhand braggadocio.” The article referred to her hasty expulsion on August 21, but made no mention of Bobby Kennedy’s role in it.

  The previous week Harold Macmillan had resigned as prime minister. The proximate cause was a prostate attack in early October that had required emergency surgery. But in fact the Profumo affair had brought him down, a source of both sadness and disquiet to Jack Kennedy.

  The Rometsch matter had resurfaced a month earlier when the FBI and Justice Department launched investigations into Bobby Baker’s far-flung business interests after some suspicious activities were mentioned in a lawsuit against Baker by a Washington vending machine company. Investigators made allegations of kickbacks involving both cash and sexual favors for government contracts. When Bobby Baker resigned as secretary of the Senate on October 7, the news led the Washington Post, and Mollenhoff eagerly plumbed his contacts. According to Robert Kennedy biographer Evan Thomas, FBI sources probably tipped Mollenhoff about Rometsch, whose name was linked to both JFK and George Smathers in the newsman’s diaries. Mollenhoff, in turn, told Williams about Rometsch’s activities and urged the senator to issue subpoenas to unearth more details.

  Kenny O’Donnell later said that JFK joked about the Baker probe while asking him to quiz White House aides about their contacts with the former secretary to the Senate majority leader. Kennedy also made light of both Rometsch and Baker to Ben Bradlee, who could see that JFK had been “briefed to his teeth” on Baker. JFK told the newsman that Baker was a “rogue, not a crook. He was always telling me he knew where he could get me the cutest little girls, but he never did.” Kennedy also joked to Bradlee about the “dirt” Hoover had on certain senators. “You wouldn’t believe it,” said the President.

  Yet it was hardly a casual matter, judging by the large volume of phone calls on both October 25 and 26 involving JFK, Bobby, O’Donnell, Hoover, Mollenhoff’s publisher John Cowles, and LaVern Duffy, an investigator for Bobby who had been a lover of Rometsch and who had escorted her to West Germany in August. Bobby hurriedly dispatched Duffy back to Germany to ensure Rometsch’s continued silence, and the West German government released a statement insisting that she had no dealings with East Germany. “Correspondence between Rometsch and Duffy . . . suggests that Duffy sent her money, but does not indicate the amount or the source,” Thomas wrote.

  The strongest indicator of concern by the Kennedys was Bobby’s meeting with Hoover on Monday, October 28. The attorney general argued that if the Williams probe linked senators to a woman suspected of spying for the communists it could create a national crisis. Later that day Hoover met with congressional leaders Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen. The FBI director said no evidence had turned up to prove espionage by Rometsch or her sexual activity with anyone in the executive branch—but he did document Rometsch’s liaisons with senators. Whether this was the plain truth or a shrewd ploy to protect JFK is one of the many secrets that Hoover took to the grave. When Williams convened his hearings the next day, he limited his inquiries to Baker’s business affairs, and the Rometsch scandal vanished.

  By then, Bobby Kennedy had paid a shameful price for Hoover’s help. After months of resistance, Bobby had yielded to pressure from the FBI director on October 10 to authorize extensive wiretaps on the telephones of Martin Luther King Jr. Hoover supposedly was interested in proving that the civil rights leader had ties to communists, but he primarily wanted to delve into King’s extramarital sex life. Given the potential problems of the Rometsch threat at the time, Bobby had little choice but to placate Hoover, even though he knew that the wiretaps would probably be abused.

  Vietnam was just then approaching a climactic moment. Throughout October, South Vietnamese generals plotted a coup while Kennedy and his men kept abreast of their progress. At the same time, Ambassador Lodge increased pressure on Diem to make changes. Finally, on October 29, Lodge cabled that a coup was “imminent,” and JFK met with his national security advisers to discuss American support for the effort. As a result, Bundy sent a cable to the embassy in Saigon on October 30 saying the United States would “reject appeals for direct intervention,” but he added that once a coup had begun, it was in American interests “that it should succeed.”

  On Friday, November 1, the generals launched their coup, and the next morning the White House Situation Room received word that Diem and his brother had been shot in the back of the head and stabbed by bayonets. On hearing the news, Kennedy bolted from the room “with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before,” Maxwell Taylor recalled. To Schlesinger, JFK appeared “somber and shaken. I had not seen him so depressed since the Bay of Pigs.” In a Dictabelt recording two days later, Kennedy pinned responsibility on the original August 24 cable, which was “badly drafted . . . should never have been sent on a Saturday,” and which he should not have consented to “without a roundtable conference at which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views.”

  In subsequent weeks Kennedy continued to send ambiguous signals both publicly and privately about American intentions. Because he managed to speak alternately like a hawk and a dove, JFK left plenty of evidence for partisans on both sides to argue how he would have proceeded in Vietnam had he lived. Loyalists like Kenny O’Donnell said that JFK talked of a total military withdrawal from Vietnam. “I can’t do it until 1965—after I’m reelected,” O’Donnell quoted him as saying. Yet Robert McNamara told Stewart Alsop that the United States “would have intervened in Vietnam with ground troops under any circumstances because the national interest demanded intervention.”

  Kennedy’s final words on the subject—the text of the speech he intended to give in Dallas on November 22—showed his concern about the prospect of committing combat forces, but no weakening of his resolve to draw a line against communism in Vietnam. American assistance to the nations “on the periphery of the Communist world,” he wrote, “can be painful, risky and costly, as is true in Southeast Asia today. But we dare not weary of the task. . . . Reducing our effort to train, equip and assist their armies can only encourage Communist penetration and require in time the increased overseas deployment of American combat forces. . . . Our adversaries have not abandoned their ambitions, our dangers have not diminished, our vigilance cannot be relaxed. . . . We in this country, in this generation, are—by destiny rather than choice—the watchmen on the walls of world freedom.”

  The day Diem and Nhu were assassinated, Kennedy had planned to fly to Chicago for the Army–Air Force foot
ball game. Instead, after his briefing on Vietnam, he invited Mary Meyer to the White House for the afternoon. “He was in touch when things were falling apart in Vietnam,” said Anne Truitt. “It was a very natural impulse to call a friend. That is what I gathered from talking to Mary.” In any event, Meyer and Kennedy never saw each other again.

  After another hour-long meeting about Vietnam, Kennedy took the helicopter to Wexford that evening to join Jackie and the Fays. It was only the second weekend JFK had spent with his family at their new country retreat. The neighbors were well aware of their presence because the hilltop residence was “ablaze with lights,” including giant floodlights. But according to Mary Gallagher, Kennedy was displeased that the house had insufficient closet space and guest rooms. There was already talk, she noted, of building an addition.

  Jackie, however, couldn’t have been happier with Wexford. She had resumed hunting on October 26, and the next morning had taken Caroline out “beagling” with Paul Fout—pursuing rabbits down a trail behind a pack of beagle hounds. Wearing blue jeans and her hair under a large kerchief, she had been spotted window-shopping in Middleburg with John Jr. and at the grocery store buying canned soups, vegetables, and magazines.

  On that first weekend they had spent Sunday with Lem Billings and Princess Irene Galitzine, the Italian fashion designer who had been with Jackie for several days aboard the Christina. For entertainment, the Kennedys showed movies of the cruise as well as the Kennedy-Nixon debates from 1960. Galitzine noted that Kennedy was so absorbed that “he held on to my glass of champagne and drank out of it without realizing what he was doing, lost in his thoughts.”