Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy (43 page)

44
. L
YNDON
B
AINES
J
OHNSON
(1908–1973) served as congressman, senator from Texas, and Senate majority leader before Kennedy placed him on his ticket in Los Angeles in 1960. On November 22, 1963, after President Kennedy's assassination, Johnson became the thirty-sixth president of the United States.

45
. Actually seventeen.

46
. J
AMES
"S
COTTY
" R
ESTON
(1909–1995) was a
New York Times
Washington columnist who did much to shape East Coast political opinion.

47
. D
EAN
A
CHESON
(1893–1971) was Harry Truman's secretary of state, a towering figure in that era and a skeptic about JFK, sharing Truman's view that he was too callow and inexperienced to be president.

48
. An exclusive Newport club, frequented by Jacqueline's mother and stepfather, which now represented to her a cloistered social world she had outgrown.

49
. Hoping to be drafted for president at the 1960 convention, Stevenson had refused to say he would decline the nomination, if offered.

50
. In the spring of 1964, Jackie was reading and much influenced by Edith Hamilton's popular
The Greek Way
. The following spring, after examining the early version of Schlesinger's
A Thousand Days
, she wrote him in longhand, "You remember in my oral history—I disputed your remark that Adlai was a Greek + JFK a Roman. . . . Leaving Adlai out of it . . . I know what he brought to American politics in 1952—but he certainly showed many weaknesses + sad deficiencies of character later—you can make him sound as wonderful as you want—but just don't say that JFK was Roman. . . . Lyndon is really a Roman—a classic Emperor—maybe [Michigan Republican Governor George] Romney is one too. . . . Can't you make him Greek + Adlai Egyptian—or leave Adlai out + just make him Greek." After finishing her letter to Schlesinger, Mrs. Kennedy tore it in half and wrote him a milder one on the same theme.

51
. During those years, Stevenson was able to build a decent rapport with the First Lady, which he never managed with the President, whom he resented for denying him what he considered his political birthright, starting with the presidency and the State Department. But by now, Jacqueline has adopted her husband's disdain for Stevenson.

52
. M
ICHAEL
F
ORRESTAL
(1928–1989) was a family friend; son of the first secretary of defense, James Forrestal, for whom JFK had briefly worked in 1945; a New York lawyer; and later a staff member of Kennedy's National Security Council, specializing in Southeast Asia.

53
. This traditional Chicago convention hotel was actually called the Stockyard Inn, and stood across the street from the International Amphitheatre, where the delegates were meeting.

54
. Jacqueline's mother and stepfather spent summers at Hammersmith Farm in Newport. The Kennedys sometimes used the place, which was near a naval station and quieter than the Kennedy houses at Hyannis Port, as a summer White House.

55
. JFK ran for reelection as senator in 1958. He was eager to win by a margin so impressive that it would give him a running start for the 1960 presidential race.

56
. F
OSTER
F
URCOLO
(1911–1995) was the Democratic governor of Massachusetts from 1957 to 1961. Kennedy thought so little of him that if Furcolo should win the Democratic nomination against Republican senator Leverett Saltonstall in 1960 (as it happened, he lost), JFK planned to cast a quiet vote for the Republican. Some of the reasons Kennedy's poll ratings were down were his support for the St. Lawrence Seaway, which diverted jobs and commerce from Massachusetts; his work on labor reform, which outraged Teamsters and their allies; residual antagonisms from the "Onions" Burke fight; and political quarrels with the Italian-American Furcolo, which, Republicans vainly hoped, might cause an Italian-American stampede toward Kennedy's little-known opponent, Vincent Celeste.

57
. J
AMES
M
AC
G
REGOR
B
URNS
(1918– ) was a Williams College political scientist, biographer of Franklin Roosevelt, and Democratic liberal activist who in 1958 ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House from western Massachusetts.

1
. JFK's Senate reelection victory of 1958, winning 73 percent of the vote.

2
. In his 1774 "Speech to the Electors of Bristol," the Anglo-Irish statesman-philosopher said, "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

3
. Winston Churchill's long biography of his best-known ancestor, John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722). In 1704, in the War of the Spanish Succession, Marlborough and his regiments defeated the French at Blenheim on the Danube, thwarting Louis XIV's campaign against Austria. Churchill's volumes are history as heroism, romance, and drama. JFK's lifelong interest in the book and its protagonist suggests one source of affinity with his wife, who used Churchillian language in a 1978 letter describing the "treasured friends, noble figures, shared moments, great endeavors" of her husband's presidency.

4
. JFK had to leave Princeton at Christmas 1935, during his freshman year, to be hospitalized for chronic abdominal problems and a worrisome white blood cell count. On his release, he recuperated in Palm Beach, worked the summer of 1936 at an Arizona cattle ranch, and restarted his college career at Harvard that fall.

5
. J
OHN
B
UCHAN
(1875–1940) was the first Baron Tweedsmuir, a prolific author of both fiction and nonfiction, and governor general of Canada from 1935 until his death. Kennedy loved Buchan's autobiography
Pilgrim's Way
, which he read on publication in 1940, and often cited Buchan's insistence that politics was "still the greatest and most honourable adventure."

6
. I
AN
F
LEMING
(1908–1964) was the author of the thrillers starring James Bond, the British secret agent. The Kennedys met Fleming at a Georgetown dinner in 1960. The President enjoyed
From Russia with Love
in the White House theater shortly before his death.

7
.
The Daughter of Time
by Josephine Tey (1951) has a Scotland Yard official investigating whether Richard III had killed the princes in the Tower of London.

8
. Having been absorbed by Barbara Tuchman's book about the coming of World War I,
The Guns of August
, JFK sought out a broader treatment, Edmond Taylor's
The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order, 1905–1922.
It is not hard to imagine why Kennedy, having averted a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis the previous October, wanted to read it.

9
.
Patriotic Gore
, the book on the Civil War by the critic Edmund Wilson, whom the Kennedys once invited to a White House dinner.

10
. While a senator, JFK had accompanied his brother several times to a speed-reading course in Baltimore but dropped out. After he became President, press accounts exaggerated the importance of this minor episode.

11
. The writings of the Chinese Communist leader (1893–1976) would have been of particular interest to JFK in the spring of 1961, when, with considerable foresight, he was considering how much effort, if any, he should make to seek a rapprochement with China (he pragmatically decided that was a project for a second term)—and when he was preparing for a summit with the man who had, until the recent schism between Moscow and Beijing, been Mao's chief world ally—the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. And indeed during his private conversations with Khrushchev in June 1961, Kennedy quoted Mao's aphorism that power comes out the end of a rifle.

12
. M
AURICE DE
S
AXE
(1696–1750), born a German, was a French marshal general and hero of the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745. He wrote a classic treatise,
Reveries on the Art of War
, that was posthumously published in 1757.

13
. M
AXWELL
T
AYLOR
(1901–1987) was World War II commander of the 101st Airborne division and the first general of the Allied forces to ascend the French beaches on D-day. In 1959, he retired as President Eisenhower's army chief of staff, inveighing against what he thought to be Ike's overreliance on nuclear weapons—a complaint that he published in a book called
The Uncertain Trumpet
. Kennedy agreed with Taylor and cited his arguments during the 1960 campaign. Asked by JFK to investigate the Bay of Pigs failure, Taylor impressed him with his willingness to buck conventional wisdom. The President made Taylor his chief military adviser and then chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

14
. One of the presidential yachts, which JFK had renamed for his grandfather.

15
. Gielgud's recitings from Shakespeare (1958).

16
. J
ULES
D
AVIDS
(1920–1996), a gentle Georgetown University diplomatic historian who at the time was little known or published, performed research on five chapters of
Profiles in Courage
. His wife later noted that his honorarium of $700 was "a lot of money for us in those days."

17
. The Whig party of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries epitomized the British style of wealthy aristocrats standing for political office. The Whigs resisted a strong monarchy, just as their nineteenth-century American namesake party opposed powerful presidents such as their hated Andrew Jackson. Asked by James MacGregor Burns in 1959 about presidential power, JFK insisted, "I am no Whig!"

18
. In Churchill's four-volume
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
. She means the English civil war of 1692–1696.

19
. D
ANIEL
W
EBSTER
(1782–1852), senator from Massachusetts, had his own chapter in
Profiles in Courage
for supporting the Compromise of 1850.

20
. In 1970, Jacqueline wrote about her husband to Ted Kennedy, "He was the only president after Jefferson, to care about gardens—(A letter that came up at Parke-Bernet the fall of 1963, which he thought was too expensive to buy, I was going to try and give him for his birthday—Jefferson writes to France—for 4 gardeners—they would also play chamber music at Monticello in the evenings.) Like Jefferson, he cared about architecture—or rather the harmony of man in his environment."

21
. A
LICE
R
OOSEVELT
L
ONGWORTH
(1884–1980), herself a landmark of Washington social life for most of the twentieth century, was Theodore Roosevelt's daughter by his first wife. Busch's book was
T.R.: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt and His Influence on Our Times
(1963).

22
. This was in the 1930s, while Joseph Kennedy served FDR as chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission and ambassador to the Court of St. James's.

23
. JFK's private coolness toward Franklin Roosevelt was almost unique among Democratic leaders of the 1960s, who usually regarded him as a household saint. It reflected Joseph Kennedy's painful break with FDR in 1941 over intervention in Europe, JFK's lingering resentment over Eleanor Roosevelt's hostility toward him before the 1960 Democratic convention, and his own lifelong aversion to almost all hero worship. Like many others, JFK was critical of what he considered to be FDR's overtolerance of Soviet military power in Europe at the end of World War II, leaving the West at a military disadvantage in Berlin and the rest of Europe, which proved to be one of Kennedy's biggest troubles as President. Still JFK was not unwilling to recognize Roosevelt's qualities of greatness, especially in domestic affairs. In the Republican household of her early upbringing, Jacqueline's father used to jocularly quote from Peter Arno's famous
New Yorker
cartoon, "Let's go down to the Trans-Lux and hiss Roosevelt!"

24
. Criticized for speaking too rarely to the American people on television, Kennedy was urged to follow the example of FDR's radio "fireside chats." He asked Schlesinger to find out exactly how many such chats Roosevelt had during twelve years as president to counter the popular impression that they were almost weekly. By contrast, President Kennedy had a press conference roughly every two weeks.