First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (9 page)

On February 3, 1971, the Nixons sent a plane to pick up Jackie, ten-year-old John-John, and thirteen-year-old Caroline in New York for the trip to Washington. The Nixons quietly welcomed the Kennedys in the Diplomatic Reception Room, and Pat, knowing how much the White House restoration had meant to Jackie, showed her an English Regency chandelier she had added to the room. The Nixons’ two daughters—Tricia, twenty-four; and Julie, twenty-two—brought Caroline, who was wearing her school uniform, and John-John to the Solarium, which was once Caroline’s kindergarten, to see the panoramic view of the National Mall. Then the Nixon daughters stood in the hallway outside the
Oval Office to let the Kennedys have a private moment inside. It was the place where their father had spent so many hours, and where two-year-old John-John had poked his head out from underneath his father’s desk in one of the most iconic photographs from the Kennedy White House. When they came to President Kennedy’s portrait in the Cross Hall, Jackie was quiet and simply thanked Pat for displaying it so prominently. The Nixon daughters dreaded showing the portrait to Caroline and John-John, but were relieved when the Kennedy children told their mother how much they liked it. Tricia and Julie continued the tour with three dogs in tow, including the Nixons’ beloved two-year-old Irish setter, King Timahoe.

The two families had dinner in the Family Dining Room on the second floor, and President Nixon joined them. Jackie, who wore an elegant long-sleeved black dress, told Pat that every first family should leave its own mark on the White House, and she complimented her on adding more antiques to the state rooms. (In a note later she told Pat, “I have never seen the White House look so perfect.”) There was an awkward moment when Jackie mused, “I always live in a dream world.” But John-John spilled his milk and lightened the mood considerably. The day after the visit, he wrote to the Nixons a heartbreakingly sweet, handwritten letter in childish scrawl on stationery with the imposing monogram
JOHN KENNEDY
in big block letters on the bottom right. “I can never thank you more for showing us the White House. I really liked everything about it,” he wrote. “You were so nice to show us everything. I don’t think I could remember much about the White House but it was really nice seeing it all again.” He said that when he sat on Lincoln’s Bed, where his father had slept, he made a wish and it was that he would do well in school. “I really really loved the dogs, they were so funny. As soon as I came home
my dogs kept on sniffing me. Maybe they remember the White House.” He ended the note saying that he had “never tasted anything as good as the soufflé.”

Caroline wrote her thank-you note on hot-pink paper with a lowercase monogram on the bottom right: “Your Swiss chef is the best thing that ever came out of Switzerland, except maybe the chocolate.” She was five days shy of her sixth birthday when her father was killed, and remembered slightly more about the residence than her little brother. “It was so nice to see it all again,” she wrote, and thanked Julie and Tricia for being so nice to her. She also remembered to thank Butlers Eugene Allen and Charles Ficklin in her note. Caroline would recall that dinner years later as an adult, saying the visit helped her mother open up and share more of her White House memories with them. “I think she really appreciated Mrs. Nixon’s thoughtfulness in the sense that there are family values and a dedication to politics and patriotism that go beyond any disagreement on issues or party. One of the things you learn, having lived in the White House, is that there really are these common experiences and what we share is so much larger than what divides us.”

Jackie’s mother-in-law, Rose Kennedy, sent Pat a touching note after Jackie called her to give the details of the evening. “Your warm-hearted welcome to her [Jackie] and my grandchildren on a day which might have been most difficult for all of them, moved me deeply. . . . And so, dear Mrs. Nixon, you brought joy to many who are near and dear to me and I thank you from my heart.”

The most poignant letter came from Jackie herself, written in her signature spidery handwriting on her sky blue stationery. “Can you imagine the gift you gave us to return to the White House privately with my little ones while they are still young enough to rediscover their childhood,” she wrote. “The day I always dreaded
turned out to be one of the most precious ones I have spent with my children. May God bless you all. Most gratefully, Jackie.”

A
FTER
P
RESIDENT
K
ENNEDY’S
assassination, the transition to the Johnson administration was difficult and emotional. Jackie politely declined all of Lady Bird Johnson’s invitations to come back to the White House. Phone calls between President Johnson and Jackie in the days following the assassination show just how much he wanted her to stay close after she moved out. After her incredible poise at her husband’s funeral, her popularity had risen to mythic heights and it was important that the Johnsons appear to have her support. In the calls LBJ tells her how much he loves her and how she gave him “strength,” and he all but begs her to come visit them. President Johnson even shamelessly had four reporters listen in on a call he made to her over Christmas 1963, in an attempt to show how close they were. But Jackie was not swayed. In 1965, Lady Bird renamed the elegant East Garden, with its boxwood and topiary trees and lavender and rosemary, after Jackie, but she never could get her to visit the White House. Jackie sent her mother, Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss, to attend the dedication of the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. “I explained to her [Lady Bird] in writing and on the telephone that it was really difficult for me and I didn’t really ever want to go back,” Jackie recalled.

Jackie and Lady Bird were bound forever by the assassination. Lady Bird was haunted by that day too, and would often refer to Jackie as “that poor young woman.” Rumors had been flying in late 1963 that Lyndon Johnson might be dumped from the Democratic ticket in 1964, so Lady Bird had gone to Texas a week earlier to prepare for the Kennedys’ scheduled stay at the Johnson ranch near Austin after they visited Dallas. She made sure
the President’s favorite Ballantine’s Scotch was available and that champagne (champagne on the rocks was Jackie’s drink of choice) and Salem and L&M cigarettes (for Jackie) were on hand. Lady Bird even laid out terry-cloth hand towels because she had heard that the First Lady had an aversion to linen ones. Because of the President’s bad back, Lady Bird had procured a horsehair mattress like the one he used in the White House, and a Tennessee walking horse was available should Jackie want to ride. The smell of pecan pies cooling in the kitchen wafted through the air as technicians from the Signal Corps furiously installed secure phone lines for the President. Lady Bird reminded everyone to have the Kennedys come through the front door, instead of the kitchen door.

Leaving the rest of the preparations to the Johnsons’ social secretary, Bess Abell, Lady Bird went to Dallas to help her husband campaign. Abell remembers talking with a Secret Service agent outdoors about the entertainment they had set up for the Kennedys, including a man who would have a gun and a whip and a lasso for an act he was to perform. Suddenly someone ran down to the riverbank saying that the President had been shot. “Everybody was just in shock,” she said. “We all wanted to know,
What can I do?
” The Secret Service agents who had been waiting for the President’s arrival crammed around the television set in the kitchen, and in a panic Abell called her husband, Tyler, who would later become Johnson’s chief of protocol. He told her, “Bess, you’ve just got to buck yourself up and get yourself together. You’re in charge, now make something happen.”

Lady Bird was with her husband two cars behind the President’s limousine when the fatal shots were fired. She later stood dutifully beside him as he took the oath of office in the executive suite of Air Force One. Bess Abell did not see her until the next day when she went to the Johnsons’ Washington home, the
Elms. Lady Bird was sitting in a small room off the foyer, a room she loved because of its privacy. Lady Bird put her arms around her friend. “Oh Bess, what you’ve been through,” she said. Abell laughs at the memory now—here was a woman who saw firsthand the devastation in Dallas, but she was worried about someone else. “She always thought about somebody else. She was just in control, she was moving forward.”

After her husband’s death, Jackie wrote a letter to LBJ and recounted good times they had all shared together. “We were friends, all four of us. All you did for me as a friend and the happy times we had. I always thought, way before the nomination, that Lady Bird should be the First Lady—but I don’t need to tell you here what I think of her qualities—her extraordinary grace of character—her willingness to assume every burden. She assumed so many for me and I love her very much.” Jackie ended the note with a sad and needless apology: “It cannot be very much help to you your first day in office to hear children on the lawn at recess,” she wrote, referring to Caroline’s kindergarten in the White House Solarium. “It is just one more example of your kindness that you let them stay—I promise they will soon be gone.”

When President Johnson died, Jackie called Lady Bird to express her condolences. Lady Bird, after all, had been there for her during the most difficult time in her life. “These have been emotion packed days, but there is still a certain feeling of insulation from the deep sadness I am sure must come,” Lady Bird wrote to Jackie, thanking her for her phone call. “You know all too well how the responsibilities come crowding in.” In the 1990s Jackie and Lady Bird met occasionally in Martha’s Vineyard, where they both vacationed. Lady Bird loved Jackie’s house on the island, and as a nature enthusiast she told Jackie, “It sits on the Island so ‘at
home’ with its surroundings, almost as if it grew out of the land!” She agonized over news that Jackie had cancer and tried to boost the spirits of the woman she shared such an incredible history with. “Do know that you have an
army
of friends—known and
unknown
—who care very much about you.”

Letters between Jackie and Lady Bird show this lifelong feeling of sympathy Lady Bird had for her predecessor and what she called “the shadow of grief” that hung over the Kennedy family. Two remarkable letters from Lady Bird to Caroline Kennedy—one a week after Jackie’s death in 1994, the other after John Jr.’s death in 1999—show the depth of her feeling for the Kennedys and the enduring bond that they shared. Lady Bird had wept for Caroline three decades before, after President Kennedy’s death, and she cried for her again when she attended Jackie’s funeral at St. Ignatius Loyola Church on Park Avenue in New York. “As I looked at the faces of the crowds—and they were deep everywhere along the streets—I felt the keen edge of their sorrow,” she wrote to Caroline. She recalled a lunch with Jackie at her Martha’s Vineyard home the August before her death. “She seemed happy and contented and that is how I shall keep her in my thoughts—full of life, serene, and so justly proud of her beautiful family.” Five years later, Lady Bird wrote to Caroline again, after the plane John was piloting plunged into the Atlantic Ocean with his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, on board. The tragedy, Lady Bird wrote, “has cast a shadow over these long days. It is particularly painful for me thinking of all the suffering your family has had to bear.” It must have been surreal for Lady Bird to write about the man she knew best as a playful two-year-old little boy. “Mere words cannot erase, or even lessen—although I dearly wish they could—the enormous burden that lays so heavily upon you,” she
told Caroline. “Surely you will be strengthened by the love and pride you feel for John, as so many of us did. He was the ‘nation’s child,’ too, universally admired and respected—a promising life too early ended.”

Presidents and first ladies, in and out of office, felt protective of the Kennedy children, who had endured so much. In 1996, John F. Kennedy Jr., by then the head of a major political magazine,
George
, and already named
People
’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” was at the Republican convention in San Diego to interview Gerald Ford for his magazine. After the interview, Ford, who was widely regarded as the nicest and most gracious of the former modern presidents, told him, “You know, John, I knew your dad fairly well. Is there anything you’d like to know about him?” Susan Ford was there and recalls that her father spoke privately with John. Her father never told her what Kennedy asked him. “He felt that was very much between him and John.”

Laura and Barbara Bush say that Lady Bird, a fellow Texan, is their favorite first lady. Aside from each other, of course. The Bushes and the Johnsons have a surprisingly strong relationship built over years of shared political ambition. In the 1950s, Lyndon Johnson was in the Senate with Prescott Bush, George H. W. Bush’s father, before divisive partisanship engulfed Washington. When Johnson, a Democrat, told George H. W. Bush, a Republican, how much he respected his father, Bush said he was happy to hear that from such a loyal Democrat. “Your father and I don’t like to be thought of as Republican or Democrat, rather as good Americans!” Johnson replied. George H. W. Bush was the first Republican congressman to represent the Houston area, and he voted for President Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1968, even though it cost him political support. Bush left the inaugural celebration for Johnson’s Republican successor, Richard Nixon,
to say goodbye to the Johnsons at Andrews Air Force Base, an act of kindness that Lady Bird always remembered. Barbara and George Bush also visited the Johnsons at their Texas ranch after they left Washington. Johnson took the Bushes for one of his famous high-octane, furiously fast drives around his 330-acre spread (Lady Bird called it their “own Serengeti”) and gave the young Republican congressman advice. The trip was a time for Barbara, a future first lady, and Lady Bird, a former first lady, to bond. Barbara summed up the families’ bipartisan friendship in a 1998 letter to Lady Bird: “All Bushes love the Johnsons.”