Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy (37 page)

No, I didn't know that.

He helped—I think Charlie and Berckemeyer
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were kind of playing on that. Did the Dominican Republic—was there anything particular there? John Bartlow Martin or Bosch?
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Not much.

Well, he just said how insurmountable Bosch's problems were going to be. You know, he hoped so it would work, and then it didn't.

What was his general feeling about the Foreign Service?

Oh, and the State Department.

The State Department.

Well, it was just despair, and he used to talk all the time. You know, he had such high hopes for Rusk in the beginning, when you read his dossier of what the man was. And he liked him, sort of, personally. I mean, you could never say Dean Rusk is mean, or anything, but he saw him get to sort of be the tool, really, and he saw that that man was so—well, could never dare to make a decision or any—he never would make a decision. And Jack used to come home some nights and say, "Goddamn it, Bundy and I get more done in one day in the White House than they do in six months in the State Department." I remember once they'd—they'd asked for some message to be drafted to Russia, a very unimportant one—something like wishing Khrushchev happy birthday—maybe a little more important—and either six or eleven weeks went by and nothing had come. And then—this is another very late example—when I came back from Morocco, I told him of this brilliant, young, very low man in our embassy there, who'd been attached to the Secret Service, who learned all the Berber languages and everything—had been there two years and he was going to be transferred to the Caribbean or something, and he wanted so to go to that part of the world—Algeria or something. Well, when I told Jack that, he was really mad because he said, "I wrote Rusk a memo about that six months ago, that you shouldn't have this policy of moving everyone every two years. That it's so much better to let them build up some knowledge," or something. And he used to say that sending an order to Rusk at the State Department was "like dropping it in the dead letter box." And the one thing he was thinking of—you asked me once what he was planning to do after the election? It was to get rid of Dean Rusk.
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But yet he so hated to hurt anyone. And I said, "Well, can't he go back to the Rockefeller Foundation?" And he said, "No, no"—so sadly. "You know he's given all that up. He really burned his bridges." And I think he was sort of toying with the idea of putting McNamara in there, but it really wasn't firmed up because I don't know if he thought exactly McNamara would be right for foreign policy. And he didn't want to let Bundy go because he needed Bundy with him. But he wanted someone in there, you know, almost like McNamara or Bobby, who could just flush out all those— And it was so funny, one day three ambassadors came in to say goodbye to him, and he said they all had on striped shirts with the white collar and cuffs—you know, very English, with umbrellas on their arms—and two of them had on what he called slave bracelets. I don't know if he meant identification bracelets or elephant hair.

These are our U.S. ambassadors, about to go overseas.

Yes. And one was going to Africa, and one was going to the Near East—I don't know, Lebanon or Turkey or somewhere. And these sort of precious flits came in his office and he was just so—you know, it was the wrong idea of the kind of people he wanted to be sent out there anyway. He wanted a more rugged America sent. And he called up Rusk the minute the last one had left his office—I guess there weren't three in a day, but say, three over a week—and said, "I want you to send out a memo to everyone in the Foreign Service that not one of them can wear a slave bracelet anymore."
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But, you know, those were the kind of people who took Rusk over in the end. And he cared so about the little—like where was Rusk? He wasn't in on either part of the missile crisis or something terribly important because he'd have to go to a—

Nassau—

Oh, Nassau—

He did not go to Nassau because he had to go to a dinner for the foreign ambassadors—the annual diplomatic dinner for the foreign ambassadors in Washington.

Yeah, well, little things like that, I mean, he turned into—I mean, Jack said one terrific thing about Angie Duke, who he was so proud of in a way, because Angie does have the most beautiful manners in the world and did so much helping all that way. But Angie wanted to get out of being chief of protocol, and Jack was so surprised where Angie wanted to go. It was Tanganyika. And Jack thought he would have wanted—

Denmark.

Yeah, that he was—sort of wanted to be a Bill Blair, going to eternal parties. He was rather disillusioned at Bill Blair for that, by the way. But you know, he said, "I'm not sure Angie's quite up to Tanganyika." But he was very impressed that he wanted to go where life could be rugged, and as I said, "What about Africans?" And another thing about Dean Rusk. You know, Jack was very formal. He never called anyone by their first names until he really knew them well. And Dean Rusk was the one member of his cabinet—probably because he was older and he hadn't known him before—who he called "Mr. Rusk," right up until the last year. And suddenly one day, they broke down and he called him "Dean." But people don't know that he was that. It was part of his English—admiration for things English. He never liked it if anyone called you "Jack," or me "Jackie," or—except in the campaign, when they yell it. But then it's a sign of liking you. And he never would call anyone— He always called my mother and stepfather "Mr. and Mrs. Auchincloss."

Oh, really?

He called my mother "Mummy," because he thought it was such a funny name—as sort of a joke. But he always called my father "Mr. Bouvier."

He never called your mother "Janet"?

Never. And yet, you know, he knew them so well. But he just—he didn't think it was right.

What about some of the other people in the State Department? George Ball?
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Well, I can't exactly remember what, but I can remember he wasn't always entirely pleased with George Ball.

And of course, poor old Chester.

Oh, yeah, Chester. Chester Bowles would give some endless talk in a meeting about we should enslave—take the mud huts out of enslavement and raise the standard of the, blah—you know, go on with these rolling phrases for hours, and then Jack would say, "Yes, Chester, but I'm not asking you that. I'm asking you what we should do about this problem—X-Y-Z." Something rather simple, and Chester would never have an answer. And so he couldn't wait to get him out of there.

Averell he liked.

Yes, Averell he did like. Walt Rostow
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—it was funny, one night I was at a seminar at the Dillons. Jack was out of town, and making a speech somewhere, and he called me up, and I was called out of the room, and he said, "What's the seminar?" And I said, "It's Walt Rostow, talking about underdeveloped countries." And a lot of people like you, and Bundy, and everyone were there. And he said—so loudly, I had to put my hand over the receiver—"Jesus Christ! You mean all those people are—Walt Rostow's got all those people trapped in there, listening to him?" Because he really thought Walt Rostow went on and on, and was hard to listen to. He said, "I'm glad I'm not at that seminar." But he liked him. He never said anything mean about him. He said Jerome Wiesner always used to peek through his door.
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He'd come around through Mrs. Lincoln's office and peek—he said it used to drive him crazy. Every time the door would be open, Wiesner's head would peek in and out, and it would finally drive him so crazy he'd say, "All right, come in or else go away," and it was usually something unimportant.

He liked Wiesner, though, I think.

Oh, yes.

On this—when it came to appointing ambassadors, there was always the—the State Department always wanted to appoint a Foreign Service officer, and the White House people always wanted to send some non–Foreign Service officer—someone like Bill Attwood, or someone like that. Did he ever comment on that general problem?

Well, just as I said, that the Foreign Service ambassadors were usually so awful. And, you know, sometimes you obviously had to send one. You couldn't demoralize the State Department so completely. Then he went over there to give a talk to them once and to tell them—and he really prepared that talk. He said, it's so awful in the State Department. They get so demoralized. They get sort of trained not to take a position one way or the other, but by the time they get way up—and he said younger people should get up quicker—they just can't give you any answer but the answer that's no answer—safe on both sides. And so the whole point of the speech that he gave to them was that you must, you know, be prepared to take an answer one way or the other, and you must be prepared to go to Congress, or—I don't know. Just that their training was wrong, and they were brainwashed by the time they got there, and, mostly too effete to do any good, which was sort of the standard the people at the State Department admired. And just to say something rather interesting and unfair about someone who was a friend, which Jack never said to me but I saw this later, this winter when he came to see me—it's Chip Bohlen. He loved Chip Bohlen, and when Chip Bohlen was around. And sometimes I used to tease Chip Bohlen, and say that he was too stuffy or State Department–ish. I used to just see this side in little things. But he was appointed ambassador to Paris just about the time of the missile crisis—

That's right.

And Bobby asked him to stay, and I think Jack asked him, but sort of vaguely, but Chip Bohlen couldn't wait to get on that boat.
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And I said to him this winter—he came to see me in this house—something about it or "Why weren't you there?" And Bobby told me the reason he wanted Chip Bohlen to stay so much was that he'd been their Russian adviser for so long and Llewellyn Thompson had just sort of come in and they didn't really know Thompson that well. So here they were, entering this crisis with a new Russian expert. But Bohlen had to take the boat—he wasn't even going to take a plane. And so I said to Bohlen, "Aren't you sad?" or "You missed it," or "Why did you go?" And he said, "Oh, well, I didn't think it was very important. It didn't seem so bad." And then he said, "I thought I could perhaps do more good over there, from that side." Which was so much baloney because he just barely got there. And he said, "Was it really all that serious? It didn't seem that to me." And I thought, "My Lord, the greatest, most awful thing that's happened in your lifetime—and all you can say was that it was not that serious?" And the thing is that even Chip Bohlen was so imbued—who is a brilliant man—by that State Department thinking, that the one thing that mattered to him most—he'd finally been made ambassador to Paris, where, he said, he hoped and assumed he would stay, he told me—this is under Johnson. But once that happened, he didn't care what was happening, he was going to get there. I just think that's sad. Though I love Bohlen, it makes me think so much less of him.

I know. It's very puzzling. I did an oral history thing with him, and he went through all this, and I asked him and got the same unconvincing—and he said, "Well, everything was set up, and if I went to Paris, I could explain what our policy was." And it was not convincing. But then he loved the President and said one marvelous thing about him. He said—I mean, this is on the tape—that he said if—"When the President was killed and Johnson came in, I felt this was the future giving way to the present or the past."

Oh, then another thing that disappointed me about him—he named—he was there at the ceremonies where they named a street after Jack in Paris and he sent me his speech. Well, one line of it was, though there was "a certain sadness about this day," the naming of this street shows that Franco-American relations—is a great step forward for Franco-American relations, or something. Well, I just thought, this day "
une certaine tristesse
" was the words. I wanted to write him back—but the poor man sent me the speech, so, of course, he was trying to do his best—and say, "Is that all you think of this day? A certain sadness? You sound like Hervé with your Franco-American relations'!" So, Bohlen had so much but he didn't—I don't know, a little extra thing.

He's the best of the Foreign Service officers, but even he has been deformed in some way by that—

And, for instance, if he, who's brilliant, could have been made secretary of state, it wouldn't have done any good because he would protect his own, and that was just what Jack wanted to get out of there—the people who would protect their own.

On the domestic side, economic policy and so on, Walter Heller.
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I don't really know what he thought about what Walter Heller did or everything. He didn't have the same personality as Walter Heller, so whereas Galbraith and everyone you would have home or for dinner, we never saw Walter Heller. I think he thought he leaked a lot of things—didn't he?