Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy (22 page)

JACQUELINE KENNEDY AND HER CHILDREN AT LETITIA BALDRIGE'S FAREWELL PARTY, 1963
Robert Knudsen, White House/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

Nancy was a much closer friend?
⁷¹

Nancy was my roommate and ever since she came, the difference that life was. How much more time there was to be able to enjoy—to make yourself so that Jack would enjoy you more. I tried to get her sooner, but she wouldn't come.

Nancy is the nicest girl. She's also a very funny girl and a very sharp one.

Yeah.

Underneath the surface, shy—different than the exterior.

And she's feminine. I mean, Tish is sort of a feminist, really. She used to tell me she loved to have lunch in the White House Mess so she could argue with men. She's great, but she was so different from me and just exhausted me so.

How about Pam?
⁷²

Pam was fantastic because in the beginning I didn't think I'd need a press secretary and other people, the one person had done them both. But when I saw what Tish was like about the press, Jack got so mad. Tish had her own press conference before inauguration at the Sulgrave Club. She was coming there to speak. She got television and everything there. She was laughing and saying, "Yes, we're going to hang pictures on all the walls upside down"—modern, this, that. And, you know, it really caused trouble. It was the first set of bad, sensational headlines, and Jack said, "Not one of my cabinet officers has had an interview. Would you mind telling me what the hell Tish Baldrige is doing?" She just loved the press so that I saw that if I was to keep any privacy of our life—and she was always saying, "We got to have Betty Beale
⁷³
to the first state dinner"—I must get someone who had the same reactions I did. And little Pam had been a friend of my sister's. Jack had gotten three of them—Lizzie Condon,
⁷⁴
who's now in my office, Pam, and Nini
⁷⁵
—jobs in the Senate one summer, and Pam had been in his office. Pam had stayed, the others had gone away and gotten married. And I just knew that she'd have all the same reactions I did. She was going over to work somewhere in the White House anyway, but I asked her if she'd be my press secretary and she was terrified and she didn't want to. And I told her if she did a good job—if I thought she was doing a good job, the press would always think she was no good, and if they thought she was good, she wouldn't be helping me the way I wanted, so it was very difficult for her because she's very sensitive. But she's just been ideal and it's been hard for her.

THE FIRST LADY THANKS SENATE MINORITY LEADER EVERETT DIRKSEN, VICE PRESIDENT JOHNSON, AND MAJORITY LEADER MIKE MANSFIELD FOR THEIR HELP IN SECURING A CHANDELIER FROM THE U.S. CAPITOL FOR THE TREATY ROOM, JUNE 28, 1962
Abbie Rowe, National Park Service/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

She's a great girl. West was—you inherited.

Yes, J. B. West, the chief usher at the White House. He came there under Franklin Roosevelt as an usher. I guess he got to be head usher under Truman. And, well, he runs that whole place, you know. He was one of the people who contributed most to being happy in that place. Just did everything. I'm running out of superlatives now, or energy.

NANCY TUCKERMAN, CHIEF USHER J. B. WEST (DRESSED AS JBK'S BOARDING SCHOOL HOUSEMOTHER), AND MRS. KENNEDY
Robert Knudsen, White House/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

Mrs. Pearce?
⁷⁶

Oh, Mrs. Pearce. Well, she couldn't have had better credentials as a curator—everything from Winterthur, and this bright, bright little girl. And Mr. West explained to me what happened to her. Because here, this young little girl came, and so excited about what she was doing, and suddenly she'd stop working and letters wouldn't be answered. Someone would have given a fifty thousand dollars something, or someone would have written six months ago, or six weeks ago, not gotten an answer, and she was always having tea with other curators. And Mr. West said to me, "There's something I think I ought to tell you, Mrs. Kennedy. There's a disease around this place which we call White House–itis, and it hits more people—some of them, the ones you least expect." And it really hit Lorraine Pearce. One day, I found her in Jack's bedroom with Mr. Ginsburg and Levy—who run a very good furniture—American furniture store in New York. But there, in Jack's bedroom, in our private floor, on the floor, looking under his table or his bed. And I said, "Lorraine, what are you doing bringing these men up here?" Well, she'd get outraged and she'd say, unless she could have them inspect the marquetry or something, she was going to write to the President herself. And she just got so grand that, after a while, she stopped being useful and you had to get rid of her. She told me it would take ten years to write the guidebook and I said, "I'm sorry, we don't have ten years"—and "if the President can do all he's doing." So then the little timid-mouse registrar, Bill Elder,
⁷⁷
came as curator and he was very good as curator. He never wanted any publicity, but he was also so in love with looking at the bottom of furniture and stuff that he never answered a letter or the telephone either. But he was much better. But finally Lorraine, with me pressuring her, got things together and, I suppose, she and I wrote the guidebook. She'd send a batch of illustrations and do part of the text and I'd pick all the ones I wanted in. You know, it was like drawing teeth and Jack used to say, "What is wrong with that girl? She had the chance of a lifetime, the best job in America for someone of her field—to have that now, with all this interest." And White House–itis just went to her head. And then Tish got it. Pam never got it. I think very few of the people on Jack's side got it. I don't know, you'd know more about that. Tish loved to pick up the phone and have "White House calling" or "Send all the White House china on the plane to Costa Rica" or tell them that they had to fly string beans in to a state dinner. And oh, she sort of arranged Ireland, when they said, "Well, we grow wonderful peas here." You know, just anything that was sort of this power thing. And White House–itis—it's fascinating. You can see which of your friends it affects that suddenly start to treat you differently. I used to think if I ever wrote a book, it would be called "The Poison of the Presidency" because it poisoned so many relationships with people outside.

How would that happen?

Well, some people who don't see you as much as they'd like would say terrible things about you. Or, some that were your old friends would always be the same, but others would be so excited about being known but then they'd go tell just little tidbits like, I don't know, "Caroline said this or that." They'd make up something, just to show that they'd been there. Or the other people who suddenly never spoke to you before, but start calling you up or trying to send you some marvelous present. And one person, André Meyer, who was the first person to give to Jack's library, who's this very crusty man, he's head of Lazard Frères in New York, who didn't want to give to the White House—he's sick of being dunned and touched, and when I told him I didn't want him to,
⁷⁸
then, I think he got to like me and he was the biggest help of all. When Jack died, he came ten days later with a check for $
250
,
000
for the library before we'd almost even said anything about it. I used to see him when I'd go to New York because he had the apartment under ours at the Carlyle, and I'd be tired up there. I'd just like to go down and have dinner with him and he said, "You will see, when you leave the White House many people who you think were your friends will no longer be. But I will always be your friend because"—and I see it now so well, I mean, I always—

Oh, really?

I mean, I always knew which ones. Everybody's still a friend, but you see the ones who get so excited about power and go over to the new, which is fine. You see it in what some people write, well, you always know—Mr. Kennedy always said you can always—if you can count your friends on five fingers of one hand, you're lucky. And I have the friends I always knew I'd have, which I—

I met André Meyer the other day in New York. I was having dinner with Mendès France,
⁷⁹
who was also staying at the Carlyle. They ran into each other in the elevator. A very nice man, he spoke with affection of you.

I sort of think he's rather a misanthrope—

He is crusty.

Until he loves you and then—and he loved and admired Jack so, without hardly ever knowing him. He always said he was the only Dem—he said, "I am so ashamed of my colleagues in Wall Street. They do not see what this man is doing"—you know.

I think that's enough for the day.

Yeah.

D
uring the campaign, Cuba emerged as an issue. Had the President been much concerned about Castro? Do you remember in '59 when Castro first came in, what he felt?
¹

I remember how awful he thought it was that he was let in. We knew Earl Smith then, who'd been Eisenhower's ambassador at the time. When we were in Florida—that's all Earl could talk about.
²
Yeah, then Jack was really sort of sick that the Eisenhower administration had let him come and then the
New York Times
—what was his name, Herbert Matthews?
³

That's right.

I can remember a lot of talk about it and wasn't—didn't even Norman Mailer write something?

Norman Mailer was very pro-Castro, yeah.
⁴

Yeah. I remember Jack being—

Did Earl Smith think it was—talk about Communists—Castro as a Communist, or working with the Communists at that time? He's written a book, as you know—
⁵

Yeah—
The Fourth Floor
? Well, he was always saying his troubles with the State Department—I remember there was a man named Mr. Rubottom he kept talking about. And how hard it was—warning against Castro and how just it was like, I don't know, dropping pennies down an endless well. He just never could get through to the State Department. So, I suppose he thought he was a Communist, yeah.

And the President's view then was that, as you say, our policy was wrong in not letting it happen. But on the other hand, he wasn't—he had no sympathy with Batista.

No. No, I can just remember the talk about it, but you know. I'm not very good at—

Then came the campaign. And then after the campaign—remember when Allen Dulles came to—

Oh, Allen Dulles came to Hyannis after—yeah.
⁶
The first two people Jack thought he had to keep were J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles, and nice as Allen—well, turned out to be not so—
[chuckles]

Nixon in his book wrote that the President had been told during the campaign about this, which is wrong, since Dulles and the President both said he didn't know about it until November, about the fact that we'd been secretly training the Cuban—
⁷

Well, he never said to me that he knew anything, so I believe that.

When did you first become aware of all this brewing?
⁸

Well, you always knew the Cuba problem. Wasn't the weeks before it happened, every press conference or every week there was something about Cuba?

The stories began to appear in March saying that an invasion was likely, or something like that.

And then all the time at his press conferences, Jack would keep having to say United States troops won't be committed, sort of dodging everything that way. Then I knew about all those people being trained. But I just remember, well, it was like the second time, when Keating was going on every week about something that the missiles weren't out or there were more missiles there.
⁹
I mean, it was just Cuba, Cuba, all the time in one way or another.

What did you—do you remember what the President's feeling was about the invasion before? Did he—for example, you mentioned the Fulbright meeting the last time.

Well, obviously leading up to it, he was always uneasy. But the time I really remember well was the weekend before, which would be April
13
and
14
. We were down in Glen Ora with Jean and Steve Smith, and it was one afternoon—you'll know if it was Saturday or Sunday—about five o'clock in his bedroom, he got a call and he—I was in there and he was sitting in the edge of the bed, and he asked—it was from Dean Rusk—and it went on and on, and he looked so depressed when it was over. And I said, "What was it?" and everything. And I guess Dean Rusk must have told him—or just been very much for it, or something—or did Jack say, "Go ahead," then? I guess that was a decisive phone call.
¹⁰

I think this was the phone call about the air strike.

Oh, that Dean Rusk wanted to take it away, I guess. That's right. So anyway—and then Jack just sat there on his bed and then he shook his head and just wandered around that room, really looking—in pain almost, and went downstairs, and you just knew he knew what had happened was wrong. But I suppose he was in—you know, it was just such an awful thing. He was just in—well, anyway. Usually, as I said, he made his decisions easily and would think about them before or once he'd made them, he was happy with them. And that's the one time I just saw him, you know, terribly, really low. So it was an awful weekend.

Do you think his being low related to that particular decision to—about the—cancel the air strike or to the general decision to have gone ahead with the invasion, or was that—

I think it was probably a combination of all of them, don't you?

Yeah.

I mean, the invasion in the beginning and then no air strike—half doing it and not doing it all the way, or should—I don't know. Just some awful thing that had been landed in his lap that there wasn't time to get out of. And then all the things that he told me about Cuba—I can't remember if he told me at the time or later—but you know, the meetings and how he'd say, "Oh, my God, the bunch of advisers that we inherited!" And then later on, when Taylor was made chief of staff, he'd say, "You know, at least I leave that to the next President"—or "If Eisenhower had left me someone like that. Can you imagine leaving someone like Lyman Lemnitzer?" and you know, all those people in there.
¹¹
I mean, just a hopeless bunch of men. And I can remember one day—would it be after it had failed, I guess, or before?—at the White House? Him especially, I was on the lawn with the children and he especially came out with Dr. Cardona
¹²
—

Oh, yes. That was after.

And, you know, well, he thought he'd been wonderful afterwards then. And he just—

I think that was a Wednesday afternoon—

Oh.

Because I was sent down to Florida on Tuesday night and brought—Adolf Berle
¹³
and I—and brought Dr. Cardona back and took him in late Wednesday afternoon, and I think he brought him out and introduced him to you.

And then he'd keep shaking his head, and said Cardona had been wonderful. But, if you want to go back over the chronology of Cuba, there was that awf—that weekend. Then we went back to Washington Monday. Then Tuesday we had the congressional reception, and Jack was called away in the middle of it, and went over to his office and didn't come back until I was in bed.
¹⁴
You know, it was funny, because the next year at a Congressional reception, he was called away for something else of a crisis. But last year it just seemed those receptions were always nights something awful happened. So then you say Wednesday was the day everything happened. And I think it was Wednesday we had to have our pictures taken—or maybe it was Thursday. But Jack was as restless as a cat. It was with Mark Shaw and he just came up and sat down for about ten minutes—we didn't have any picture of the two of us together that you could mail out.
¹⁵
Oh, it was an awful time, and you know, he really looked awful.

PORTRAIT OF JACQUELINE KENNEDY TAKEN DURING THE BAY OF PIGS DEBACLE
©2000 Mark Shaw/mptvimages.com

It must have been unbearable to go to the Greek dinner in the midst of all this.
¹⁶

Yeah, then we had to go to the Greek dinner that night. We'd had a lunch for them one of those days, either the day before or the day after. And you know, they were so nice, the Greeks. They were almost our first visitors. But I remember so well when it happened, whatever day it was, it was in the morning—and he came back over to the White House to his bedroom and he started to cry, just with me. You know, just for one—just put his head in his hands and sort of wept. And I've only seen him cry about three times. About twice, the winter he was sick in the hospital, you know, just out of sheer discouragement, he wouldn't weep but some tears would fill his eyes and roll down his cheek. And then that time, and then when Patrick, this summer when he came back from Boston to me in the hospital and he walked in the morning about eight, in my room, and just sobbed and put his arms around me. And it was so sad, because all his first hundred days and all his dreams, and then this awful thing to happen. And he cared so much. He didn't care about his hundred days, but all those poor men who you'd sent off with all their hopes high and promises that we'd back them and there they were, shot down like dogs or going to die in jail. He cared so much about them. And then Bobby came to see me. You know, obviously there were meetings all the time—probably that afternoon or something in the White House—and Bobby came over to see me and said to, you know, "Please stay very close to Jack, I mean, just be around all afternoon." If I was going to take the children out—you know, in other words, don't leave anywhere. Just to sort of comfort him. I mean, just because he was so sad.

He said something to me that day or the next day about Bobby and wondering about making Bobby head of the CIA. Do you remember that?

Oh, I remember him saying that a couple of times, if only he could have had Bobby as head of the CIA. Well, then I suppose he just thought politically that would be too—

Too risky.

Yeah. But you know, he so wished he could have Bobby there. Then I don't know when it was he got John McCone.
¹⁷

About—not for another six months or so. He got him in the fall. One of the great things, of course, was the fact that the President, having really been led into this by very bad advice, nonetheless never blamed anyone publicly and had that wonderful Chinese proverb, so-called, do you remember? "Victory has a hundred fathers—"

"Fathers. Disaster is an orphan."
¹⁸

"Is an orphan." Where did he get that? Did you ever know?

I don't know. We could see if it's in Mao Tse-tung, because I told you he had an awful lot of Chinese proverbs.
[chuckles]
But he was always collecting things like that.

How did he feel about—it was Lemnitzer, it was, I think, and the Joint Chiefs he held more responsible privately than anyone else, my impression.

Yes, you know, he never really spoke unkindly about them, but with sort of hopeless, wry laughter, he'd talk about Curtis LeMay. I remember the time of the second Cuba, he got a picture of all our airplanes in Florida, or all over the country just standing on all the runways.
¹⁹
And he called up LeMay. But, you know, there that man was shouting to go and bomb everything and have a little war and had left all our planes out. You know, LeMay was hard to work with. But, it was the whole thing—the Joint Chiefs, and then, I guess, poor Allen Dulles. And then again, there's Dean Rusk. I don't know if you should have— It seems to me if you're going to do it, you should have had air cover. You know, Dean Rusk, being timid, but all of that—Jack coming in so late to something and everybody—I just wished if he had to do it, they'd let him alone. That was before the hundred days.
²⁰
I mean, it was silly. He never liked that hundred-day business in the papers but it was obviously some little press thing—Roosevelt. But you know, before they were even over—so you can see how early that was in the White House.