First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (24 page)

Jackie was no fool. She sought out a doctor, who was a friend and neighbor of Robert Kennedy, to talk about the bouts of depression her husband’s cheating had brought on. Once, when she was giving a reporter friend of hers from
Paris Match
a tour of the White House, she went to the vestibule of the Oval Office to say hello to the President’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. She noticed one woman who was said to be having an affair with her husband sitting quietly nearby, probably petrified. Jackie turned to her friend and said, in French, “This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband.” (Decades later, when Diane Sawyer asked Caroline Kennedy if her mother ever spoke about JFK’s betrayals, Caroline said uncomfortably, “I wouldn’t be her daughter if I would share all that.”)

Jackie was always an individual. When the President came to her with letters criticizing her for wearing shorts that were too
short, she simply said, “But they’re not too short,” and he would let it go. He did suggest that she wear hats instead of the scarves that made her look like a movie star. In an interview with the JFK Library, Jackie’s mother, Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss, revealed advice she surely gave her daughter when she was first lady. “I do really think that you have to keep your own identity or you just become exactly like Mrs. Coolidge or exactly like Mrs. Eisenhower or exactly like Mrs. Truman. I think you must try somehow—within bounds there are certain things that obviously you can’t do when you are very much in the public eye. I think Jackie, on the whole, was right to do what she thought was right or natural to her.”

J
ACKIE SPOKE IN
a childlike whisper of a voice (Kennedy’s sisters called her “the Deb” behind her back), but she was tough as nails and would cut people off if she felt they had betrayed her. She delicately crafted the image of Camelot after persuading her friend journalist Theodore H. White to refer to the Kennedy years as Camelot—a magical time that was too good to last—in
Life
magazine. “Only bitter men write history,” she told White. “Jack’s life had more to do with myth, magic, legend, saga and story than with political theory or political science.” She was terrified that her husband’s dreams and accomplishments would be forgotten. In the days following the assassination she asked President Johnson to rename the Florida space center, Cape Canaveral, after her husband. Within an hour, Johnson had it done. She did not want her contributions to be forgotten, either, and she wrote an eleven-page memo listing the treasures she had brought to the White House and had it sent to Lady Bird before she moved out.

Jackie summoned White to the Kennedy compound in
Hyannis Port on Cape Cod in Massachusetts just a week after her husband’s murder and delivered an incredibly compelling four-hour narrative of their tenure in the White House. According to handwritten notes White took during the interview, Jackie told him, “I’m not going to be the widow Kennedy in public; when this is all over I’m going to crawl into the deepest retirement there is.” Jackie painted a vivid picture of those frightening moments after her husband was shot, when she cradled him in her arms as they raced to Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital. “Jack, Jack, can you hear me? I love you, Jack.” When they finally got to the hospital (the short ride felt interminable) Jackie’s beloved Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, pleaded with her to allow them to get the President out of the car. But she didn’t want anyone to see him like that, with his brains exposed and blood everywhere.

“Mrs. Kennedy,” Hill said. “Please let us help the President.” But she would not let go of her husband.

“Please, Mrs. Kennedy,” he begged her. “Please let us get him into the hospital.” When she didn’t answer he instinctively knew the problem and took off his jacket and placed it over the President’s head. It was only then that she let go.

She insisted on going in to see her husband before they closed the casket in the hospital, and a police officer helped her pull off her stained white gloves that were stiffened with his blood. She put her simple bloodstained gold wedding band on his finger and kissed his hand. Later, she regretted the decision and felt she had nothing left of him, so one of Kennedy’s most trusted aides called the morgue and got the ring back. “This is the closest thing I have to a memory of him,” she told White as she quietly twisted it around her finger. “He bought it in a hurry in Newport just before we were married. It wasn’t even engraved to me when he gave it to me. I had to put the date in later.”

She carefully edited White’s thousand-word essay, which ran in
Life
’s December 6 issue. She talked about the “magic” of her husband’s presidency and how they would listen to the Lerner and Loewe Broadway musical
Camelot
before going to sleep. “I’d get out of bed at night and play it for him when it was so cold getting out of bed,” she said, using the “old Victrola” in the dressing room between their two bedrooms to soothe him to sleep. His favorite lines came at the end: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”

Jackie, like most of the other first ladies, was the fiercest protector of her husband’s legacy. She held epic grudges against any of his detractors, or anyone who questioned the mysterious perfection of those thousand days. She never spoke again to their close friend the
Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee after his book
Conversations with Kennedy
was published in 1975 because she felt that the book was too intimate. She selected historian William Manchester to write the definitive account of her husband’s assassination and gave him unprecedented access, spending hours with him recounting her most personal memories of her husband’s death. But she was furious when she saw the final product,
Death of a President
, and demanded that his publisher, Harper & Row, and
Look
magazine, which was set to run an excerpt of the book, make hundreds of changes. “The worst thing in my life was trying to get all those things of Mr. Manchester’s out of his book,” Jackie said. “I did my oral history with him in an evening and alone, and it’s rather hard to stop when the floodgates open.” She failed in her attempts to make sure that Manchester did not receive any of the profits, but he was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown because of the stress of the legal battle.

Jackie was similarly furious when, in 1978, she signed the
deed of gift on her oral history interview for the LBJ Library and almost immediately Hugh Sidey of
Time
magazine got hold of it and wrote a column on it. Soon other organizations were clamoring for it and for duplicate copies of the tape of the interview. The tape and the transcript were to be made available unless the donor objected, and since Jackie had signed over the deed to the library no one was at fault. Still, she was angry and had her lawyer insist that the transcript and tape be removed from the research room until she and the library could work on a new agreement. Lady Bird wrote to Jackie on August 3, 1978, acting like a concerned mother: “Library staff members have explained to me how the routine of the Archives regulations could result in the unfortunate exploitation of your interview. Nonetheless, I feel that steps could have been taken, and should have, to be more protective of you. You have had to endure so much in the public eye, I hate for us to be even the distant agent for unpleasant publicity for you.” Lady Bird would never stop feeling protective of Jackie.

P
AT
N
IXON GREW
up on a small truck farm in Artesia, California, about twenty miles southeast of Los Angeles. She lost her mother to cancer when she was twelve. After her mother’s death she took over the household chores, including the laborious task of doing the laundry, which involved building a fire in an outdoor brick fireplace and lifting the clothes with long sticks from cauldrons of boiling water into cold water and hanging the heavy wet clothes on a line to dry. (Even in the White House, with a staff of almost one hundred, she insisted on washing her own underwear and nightgowns and doing her own packing for trips.)

She told her daughter Julie, “When my mother died I just took responsibility for my life.” She also took care of her two older
brothers and her father before his death from silicosis, or miner’s disease, five years after her mother’s passing. By the age of seventeen, Pat was an orphan. She was determined to get a college degree and worked her way through the University of Southern California as a telephone operator and a bit actor in movies. She graduated cum laude in 1937. When she worked at a bank she was robbed at gunpoint; even then she calmly studied the robber’s face and identified him to police. She met Richard Nixon when they both tried out for parts in a local production of
The Dark Tower
in 1938. She was earning $190 a month teaching shorthand and typing at a high school in Whittier, California, and he was a young lawyer in town who had just graduated from Duke University School of Law, where he was nicknamed “Gloomy Gus.”

Nixon fell in love with Pat at first sight and proposed to her the day they met, but he had to court her for two years until she agreed to marry him. He was so infatuated that he even occasionally drove her to Los Angeles to meet other men for dates just so that he could spend time with her in the car. Her letters to him were friendly and decidedly unromantic. She began one 1938 letter with “Hi-ho, Hi-ho! How does it go?” and invited Nixon over so she could “burn a hamburger” for him. His notes to her reveal a deep love that may have lessened over the years but was strong at first. “Every day and every night I want to see you and be with you. Yet I have no feeling of selfish ownership or jealousy. In fact I should always want you to live just as you wanted—because if you didn’t then you would change and wouldn’t be you,” he wrote in a voice that is hard to picture as Richard Nixon’s. “Let’s go for a long ride Sundays; let’s go to the mountains weekends; let’s read books in front of fires; most of all let’s really grow together and find the happiness we know is ours.” They married on June 21, 1940, in a Quaker ceremony in Riverside, California.
Pat was twenty-eight and Dick was twenty-seven. After several years in the navy during World War II, Nixon decided to run for Congress. Pat became his office manager and spent the rest of her life supporting his political ambitions, even though it was not the life she had ever wanted for herself or for her family.

Richard Nixon’s youngest and last surviving brother, Ed, remembers those early days and how Pat, whom he had met in 1939 when he was nine and she was twenty-seven, took him under her wing. He told her that he wanted to see what the beach was like and she said, “Well, let’s go see!” The Nixons were a working-class family who all worked at the family-owned grocery store and gas station in Whittier, and Ed says they never had time for anything but work. At the beach, Ed says, “I remember her running, she could almost run as fast as me, and that was something for a girl. . . . She wanted me to see the other side of life.”

Pat’s White House chief of staff and press secretary, Connie Stuart, says Pat did not want to be first lady in 1968; she wanted to be first lady in 1960, when her husband lost to John Kennedy. Pat was so upset by that defeat that it would be the only time photos show her crying. In fact, she sobbed after her husband all but conceded the election to Kennedy in the ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. She tried to hide from the cameras as she walked with her husband to their fifth-floor suite. Unable to hold it in any longer, she left his side and darted out ahead of him and ran to her bedroom so she could close the door and mourn the loss alone. She had worked hard on the campaign trail and she tried desperately to fight back bitter tears: “Now I’ll never get to be first lady.”

Pat was all the more stung by the narrow loss because her husband had been so kind to Kennedy; they shared memories of their time as junior senators and of the times when Nixon visited him as Kennedy was recovering from a back operation that nearly killed
him in 1954. Jackie even wrote Nixon a note thanking him for his help while her husband was sick: “I don’t think there is anyone in the world he thinks more highly of than he does you—and this is just another proof of how incredible you are.” But during the heat of the 1960 campaign, the gloves were off and Pat was deeply hurt. Years later, when they were finally in the White House and Watergate was consuming her husband’s presidency, she wondered aloud why no one in the media crucified Kennedy for stealing that election, citing the speculation that Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley had stolen Illinois’s twenty-seven Electoral College votes for Kennedy. (Kennedy won the bitter 1960 election by just 300,000 votes, or less than one-half of 1 percent of the total vote.)
Why had no one investigated the Kennedys for voter fraud when her own family was subjected to so much scrutiny?