Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  BF: So Tony was angry at her in death?

  B: I think so, a little bit. I don’t know, it’s more complicated than that.

  Mary Meyer and Tony Bradlee exiting Marine One at Grey Towers, the Pinchot estate, Milford, Pennsylvania, September 1963

  In October of 2008, presidential historian Michael Beschloss appeared on NBC’s Nightly News with Brian Williams to discuss an interview that Ben and his then colleague at Newsweek, Jim Cannon, had conducted with presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy on January 5, 1960. (Cannon had been working on a book about presidential politics and had asked Ben to line up the interview.) Williams heralded it as the “audiotape of an extraordinary conversation just discovered that everyone, including members of the Kennedy family, will be hearing tonight along with us for the first time.” The segment that Williams aired focused on Kennedy’s absorption with politics, and with the fact that he seemed privately to be more worried about losing the nomination than he did publicly.

  “You rewind the tape,” Beschloss told Williams, “you go back to the time before he was president, he wasn’t even sure he was going to get elected. He didn’t see himself as a grand historical figure. He had some of the same fears and anxieties that the rest of us do.”

  Shortly after the broadcast, audio copies of the interview and an official transcript arrived at Ben’s office. Having seen the news segment, I read the transcript casually but felt no great sense of urgency about any of it. I figured that Beschloss and Williams had milked out all of the interesting bits.

  A couple of months later, I ran into Beschloss at a party at Ben and Sally’s. We talked about the Kennedy interview, and then he asked me if I’d listened to the tape.

  “I’ve read the transcript,” I offered.

  “Listen to the tape,” he said.

  As soon as I put my headphones on I understood why. As the recording comes up, you hear Cannon saying “Testing, testing,” and then Ben’s voice, impossibly deep: “Tell ’em about school.” Tony’s young daughter, Tammy, starts talking about making a calendar but grows shy. Cannon invites Rosamond, another stepdaughter of Ben’s, to give it a try. She squeaks out “Writing!” but doesn’t have much else to say either. We are transported back to Ben’s living room, circa 1960. The tape recorder whooshes into silence, then whooshes back into life—this was a reel-to-reel job—landing hard on the unmistakable voice of JFK: “You can’t overestimate the egoism of children, can you?”

  It’s a wonderful recording, an hour and sixteen minutes, from JFK’s dining room at 3307 N. You can hear the ice in the glasses, the silverware clattering on the plates, Tony and Jackie carrying on side conversations and giggling with each other while the men get down to business.

  The first thing I noticed was how Ben and Kennedy talked to each other. You can hear their closeness. JFK completes Ben’s sentences, anticipates Ben’s questions, talks about Ben’s work and career aspirations in a way that reflects real intimacy. They kid around with each other in the free and easy way of people who spend a fair amount of time together.

  I also realized fairly quickly that the official transcript wasn’t accurate—or, I should say, not complete. A good deal of the conversation hadn’t been transcribed, many of the more human and gossipy bits:

  B: But Jack, you preserve your energy very well. Just noticing you on that one trip, you lasted a hell of a lot better than I did.

  [Woman]: [Ben] got more sleep, didn’t he?

  JFK: Yeah, he did, but he was up drinking all night.

  Kennedy is surprisingly dismissive of Jackie. In response to a question about other career paths he might have taken, Kennedy says, “I will say there was never any emphasis on my going into business. Never.”

  Jackie chimes in, “Which he really would have liked.”

  “No he wouldn’t have,” Kennedy snaps. “I was completely uninterested in it.” There is a moment of confusion, and then he says, with some derision, “Why don’t you sit in there,” clearly pointing to a different room.

  “We like it, Jack!” Jackie pleads.

  “We like to be with our men,” Tony says. A different era. But Tony is uncowed. A few minutes later: “Could I ask a question?”

  “Sure,” JFK says. He says it very sweetly, slowly, with none of the impatient scorn he’d shown Jackie.

  “Is being president the ultimate of everybody’s ambition?”

  “I suppose being head of whatever organization you’re in, I suppose is that, but most importantly is the fact that the president today is the seat of all power.” He takes her question seriously. “I worked for two years on the labor bill. Eisenhower made one fifteen-minute speech on the labor bill and had a decisive effect on the action of the House of Representatives, his speech. His one speech, took fifteen minutes.”

  I thought I detected something in the tone of Kennedy’s voice. “He flirted with Tony,” I wrote to myself in my notes. I knew that Kennedy had once referred to Tony as his “ideal woman,” but hearing them all talk brought it home. My mind moved to a deeper suspicion. “Maybe that’s the big secret?” I wrote.

  At a few points, Kennedy throws a couple of shots across Ben’s bow. Asked for the hundredth time why he wants to be president, Kennedy says, “Ben would understand. My scope is far greater than Ben’s. He works extremely hard on his effort, but my scope is unlimited. His scope is somewhat limited, because he goes to press every week … but my scope is really dependent on my judgment now and energy. And tactical and strategic sense. And then the scope is unlimited. Well I mean how the hell can you help but think that that’s the most absorbing thing in the world?”

  Tony chimes in, in Ben’s defense, “It’s not so bad being a reporter.”

  Toward the end of the interview, Ben has clearly taken enough guff from his pal Jack, though he’s given some, too.3 Ben mentions a man named Josephat Benoit, the former mayor of Manchester, New Hampshire, who had studied at the Sorbonne. “I used to get great exclusive stories out of Josephat by talking to him in French.”

  “You both have that French Canadian accent,” Kennedy says, tweaking Ben.

  “Bulllllllllllshit!” Ben sings, in protest. “I had a flawless Tours accent.”

  JFK isn’t having it. “The raarrrrrrrrrrr that you put into your ‘r’s,” he says, twisting the knife.

  “Yeah, but Joe Benoit studied at the Sorbonne, so he spoke flawless French, and he didn’t speak that kind of French.” Ben’s genuine irritation at the affront to his accent is unmistakable.4

  JFK diffuses the tension by playing to the room. “Can you see the future secretary typing all this out?” he jokes, referring to the running tape recorder. Everybody laughs, because Kennedy’s busting Ben’s balls, like a big brother almost. They’re there to talk about the presidency, and instead Ben is talking about Josephat Benoit. The tape recorder gets turned off shortly thereafter, then back on for a few final questions. I had a little chuckle as I realized that I was that future secretary, and that Kennedy would never have guessed that I would actually find that particular moment significant, or why.

  In November of 2009, I drove down to Charlottesville to spend an evening with Rosamond Pittman Casey, the young girl on the tape now grown into an artist who looks a lot like old pictures of her mom. We talked for a while about Tony. I told Ros (as she’s known) that I was struggling to get a bead on Tony, that there was something diaphanous and ungraspable about her. She agreed. She said that she had always had a hard time fixing who her mother was, that there was always some portion that Tony kept to herself. Just like Ben.

  “Ben was a great stepdad,” she told me, though he had taken some getting used to. The year that they had spent en famille in Paris, when Ben and Tony were first married, had been miserable. But eventually she and Ben had become friends. He teased her a lot, sometimes more roughly than she might have liked, but she understood that that had been his way of reaching out.

  I turned the conversation toward Kennedy. I mentioned that I had listened to
the old interview, and that I thought I had heard some flirtation with Tony on it, something in the character of Kennedy’s voice.

  “Ben hasn’t told you?” Ros said. Her daughter, Clare, who was sitting opposite us, looked up with some interest.

  “No,” I said. “He hasn’t.”

  Together, Ros and Clare and the novelist John Casey, Ros’s husband, told me a story and swore, all three of them, that it was true. Tony had told them all, more than once, about an incident with Kennedy on a yacht. They had been belowdecks, just the two of them, and Kennedy was forward with her in a way that made her uncomfortable and upset. There was some implication that Kennedy had chased Tony around and tried to push her up against a wall, been quite aggressive with her. Ben had either sensed it or perhaps even walked in on the aftermath, but apparently he could never pry the whole story out of Tony afterward. They maintained that Ben knew about it in a general way, that he’d mentioned it to them before.

  I wasn’t surprised, but it felt strange to harbor a suspicion for so long and then have it confirmed so abruptly. I repeated what they’d told me, in my own words. “I just want to be certain I have this right, and that I’m not making anything up or exaggerating,” I said.

  “It happened,” Ros said.

  Ben has always kept—figuratively, if not literally—what he calls a “Too Hard” file, where you slot the stuff that you know you need to deal with but can’t quite bring yourself to confront. The information about Tony and JFK went straight into my Too Hard file, because it felt personal in a way that my questions about Ben’s career never did. In July of 2010 I told the story to Sally, and she told me to ask him about it, so I went into his office and told him the story as it had been told to me.

  B: I think Tony had a crush on him.

  Q: Right, and you’ve said that before.

  B: But I don’t—you know, I’d be absolutely stunned if he did anything about it or she did anything about it. I don’t think they did.

  Q: No implication that anything was done—no implication of that at all. Just that he said (or did) something to her that made her uncomfortable.

  B: Tony was really upset when she learned about Kennedy and Mary … no question about that.

  Q: You already have both in Conversations with Kennedy, and more in your memoir, just that Jack said in front of you guys, you know, Jackie said, “You always say that she’s your ideal.”

  B: Yeah.

  Q: So it was no secret that he liked both Mary and Tony.

  B: Yeah, yeah.

  Q: But I felt obligated to ask you, just to chase that down.

  B: I know of no overt incident of any kind. Although I am aware that … he definitely had that from Mary and did something about it … I mean, I can’t believe that Tony would’ve had an affair with him, or vice versa.

  Q: No. I never would believe her. I would believe anything about him.

  B: Maybe Jack would’ve given it a shot.

  From: [Rosamond Casey]

  Subject: Re: quick question about ben

  Date: August 3, 2010 11:02:51 PM EDT

  To: [Jeff Himmelman]

  Dear Jeff,

  You are right, there are two reasons Ben might not remember. Either it is because Mom did not tell him about it, which could speak as much to a guilty attraction to JFK as her wish to protect Ben. Or he has forgotten it / put it out of reach of his memory. I doubt the latter because I know he was proud of the fact that the President had a kind of crush on his wife. He often quoted JFK saying that Tony was his “ideal woman.” I personally think he would have enjoyed knowing it had happened.

  I checked with two of my siblings and they both remember what I remember: Mom told us (children) at different times some time post Ben, that JFK had chased her around the hold (down below) of a boat (presidential yacht? There are pictures of Ben and Mom with the Kennedys on a small yacht or pleasure boat together. I have always assumed it was the same boat but do not know that for sure).

  It was hard to know how uncomfortable this made Mom feel. But I got the feeling at least a little …

  Ros

  In her 2004 book about the Kennedy White House, Grace and Power, Sally Bedell Smith recounts an on-the-record conversation with Tony about exactly what had happened, and when.5 In May 1963, Jackie threw a forty-sixth birthday party for her husband aboard the Sequoia, the presidential yacht. It was a rowdy night, with a lot of drinking and dancing. As Tony made her way to the bathroom late in the evening, she sensed that Kennedy was following her.

  “He chased me all around the boat,” Tony told Bedell Smith. “A couple of members of the crew were laughing. I was running and laughing as he chased me. He caught up with me in the ladies’ room and made a pass. It was a pretty strenuous attack, not as if he pushed me down, but his hands wandered.” She said that she was “pretty surprised, but I was kind of flattered, and appalled too.” She didn’t tell Ben about it at the time but said that she had told him many years later.

  “Jack was always so complimentary to me, putting his hands around my waist,” Tony told Bedell Smith. “I thought, ‘Hmmmm, he likes me.’ I think it surprised him I would not succumb. If I hadn’t been married maybe I would have.” Of Kennedy’s relationship with her sister, Tony said, “I always felt he liked me as much as Mary. You could say there was a little rivalry.”6

  Ben is a hyperaware person. If he didn’t know that Kennedy had gone after his wife, he certainly seems to have sensed it subliminally. As with the Mary Meyer episode, he leaves us clues about this in the book, too:

  Somewhere during the conversation, Jackie said to the president “Oh, Jack, you know you always say that Tony is your ideal.” The president replied “Yes, that’s true,” and then a second or two later added “You’re my ideal, Jacqueline.” (page 187)

  [of a trip to Ireland and Europe]

  The president immediately asked [Tony] to go with him on his plane, and I just as immediately nixed that as an impropriety. “Jesus, you said that fast,” Kennedy said, apparently impressed more by the speed than the morality. (page 190)

  Kennedy renewed his offer to take Tony again on his own plane, and the offer was again refused. (page 192)

  In his book Journals, Arthur Schlesinger recounts his reaction in 1974 to the news that Ben was working on a book about Kennedy. “I fear it will be greatly resented by the Kennedys,” Schlesinger writes of Conversations with Kennedy, “because I am sure it displays JFK in relaxed, gossipy and somewhat irresponsible moods in the evenings.” He was right. But then, fascinatingly, he reports what Ben said to him about it, including sentiments that would have made Ben’s book significantly more truthful and more interesting:

  Ben said to me, “I really don’t think that Jack liked me very much. He always thought I was a spiv, in the British sense—a little glib and scheming perhaps. But I think he was rather in love with Tony. He fucked Mary but he was in love with Tony. But I do think I entertained him.

  Kennedy kept Ben in a compartment—a compartment that he hoped to get some use out of, one way or another. Ben has been honest about this. But what Ben has never admitted is the feelings of rivalry and resentment that so often bubble over in his book. Ben has always been accustomed to being the insider, the tall pole, the guy with the upper hand. Kennedy deprived him of that advantage and then reminded him of it, one of the very few who could out-Bradlee Bradlee. (Ben was used to having other men’s wives develop crushes on him, not the other way around.) When you hear the two men talking on that tape from 1960, you can hear their friendship and their respect for each other, but you can also hear Kennedy rubbing Ben’s nose in it a little bit. Ben is a competitive person. He wouldn’t have liked that much.

  And so he wrote a book in 1975, and got paid a lot of money for it, in which he was able to put the mythic Jack Kennedy into a less mythic perspective. I believe his motives for that were deeper and more complicated than he has ever let on. As Ben would learn over the next couple of years, in the wake of the film version
of All the President’s Men and the resentments that it would engender at the Post, nobody likes somebody who has always got the upper hand.

  Memoir interview with Barbara Feinman, May 31, 1990:

  B: I remember [Jackie] started to stiff me, publicly stiff me, and there was a convention in New York and Sally and I were together so it must have been ’76, not married, and that was after the book. She called me up a couple of times wanting to see a copy of the book. “I hear everybody’s seen a copy but I’d like to see a copy.” I said, “Jackie, no one has seen a copy of the book, except the editor.” And she said, “Joe Kraft has seen it,” which was true, I had shown it to him. And then I said, “I’ll send it to you right away.” And I sent it to her right away.7

  And she called back in about a week and she plainly didn’t like it. “It tells more about you than it does about him,” and she said, “I showed it to the children and I didn’t enjoy showing it to them very much.” I suppose because of the language and I said I’m so sorry and it seems to me that it is a eulogy of this man and blah, blah, blah and we hung up. Not screaming mad at each other and she didn’t say please don’t do it or anything like that, but plainly miserable, unhappy.

  The next thing was this time in 1976 that we were going to somebody’s house, [Arthur Schlesinger’s] house who was having a party at the convention and Sally and I were walking up West something street and I saw her a hundred feet away coming down the steps. I said to Sally, “Here’s Jackie.” And she had turned and started walking towards me before she saw me and I put out my hand and she just walked right by. Boom—walked right by. Amazing. Even if you were pissed at somebody you could give them a sort of brittle little hello. And then, I don’t know when, it could have been before that we had been down together, the same time at this resort in St. Maarten and she was in a cabin one down from us with John and Caroline. It couldn’t have been more than fifty feet. Once we were getting out of our little cabin to go upstairs to dinner and the path just yea far from the front door and I bumped into her again and she just stiffed me again. And I haven’t talked to her, have not talked to her since.