Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy (48 page)

68
. JFK spent the long weekend before Texas in Tampa and Miami, where he made speeches, and Palm Beach, where he stayed at his father's house with his Harvard friend Torbert Macdonald and watched televised football. Having lost substantial support in most of the Deep South states he had won in 1960 over his stand for civil rights, he considered it essential to his reelection to carry Florida in 1964.

69
. E
VANGELINE
B
ELL
B
RUCE
(1918–1995) was the second wife of David Bruce (1898–1977), who was JFK's ambassador in London after occupying the same job in Paris and Bonn. Clare Boothe Luce (1903–1987) was the second wife of Henry Luce (1898–1967), founder of what was probably the most powerful single print influence on American public opinion of those years, the Time-Life organization. Partly influenced by their longtime friend Joseph Kennedy, who had persuaded Luce in 1940 to write the foreword to Jack's first book,
Why England Slept
, and who went to the length of watching his son's Democratic acceptance speech on television with Luce after they dined together, the conservative publisher had been surprisingly benign toward JFK during the 1960 campaign. But when Kennedy became President, his more doctrinaire wife, a former Connecticut congresswoman and ambassador to Italy, tended to lecture him as if he were still the student he was when they had first met.

70
. Jacqueline had taken a room in the family quarters that recent presidential families had called the "Monroe Room" and renamed it the "Treaty Room." Used by presidents from Andrew Johnson to Theodore Roosevelt as a Cabinet Room, it was restyled by Mrs. Kennedy as a dark green Victorian chamber featuring Ulysses Grant's ornate cabinet table, other late-nineteenth-century furniture and fixtures, and framed facsimiles of agreements signed in the room, such as William McKinley's peace treaty ending the Spanish-American War.

71
. N
ANCY
T
UCKERMAN
(1928– ), Jacqueline's close friend (whom the First Lady called "Tucky") and White House social secretary from June until November 1963, had known her since the age of nine, when they both attended the Chapin School in New York, and later roomed with her at Farmington, where, as Tuckerman recalled, Jackie had her walk under her horse's belly "twenty times a day to get over my fear of horses." Expecting a baby, Mrs. Kennedy planned to be "taking the veil" and winding down her public commitments from the brisk regimen pressed on her by Tish Baldrige.

72
. P
AMELA
T
URNURE
(1937– ) was Mrs. Kennedy's press secretary. Jacqueline asked her to give reporters "minimum information with maximum politeness."

73
. E
LIZABETH
V
IRGINIA
B
EALE
(1911–2006) was an extroverted and widely read Washington social columnist.

74
. E
LIZABETH
G
UEST
C
ONDON
(1937– ) was later married to the film director George Stevens, Jr.

75
. N
INA
G
ORE
A
UCHINCLOSS STEERS
(1937– ) was Jacqueline's stepsister.

76
. L
ORRAINE
W
AXMAN
P
EARCE
(1934– ), the first White House curator, was an alumna of the Winterthur graduate program and a specialist in the French impact on decorative arts in America. Although she found Pearce "as excited as a hunting dog," Mrs. Kennedy was displeased by what she saw as Pearce's desire for the limelight. For her part, with no political experience, the young Pearce felt baffled by the complex interplay among the First Lady, her Fine Arts Committee, the White House Historical Association, du Pont, and Boudin. After a year, Jacqueline had her reassigned to oversee the new White House guidebook. In September 1962, the First Lady wrote du Pont, "Why are some people so avid for publicity—when it poisons everything. I hate & mistrust it & no one who has ever worked for me who liked it has been trustworthy."

77
. W
ILLIAM
V
OSS
E
LDER III
(1933– ) succeeded Mrs. Pearce as curator.

78
. A
NDRé
M
EYER
(1898–1979) was a French Jewish refugee who headed American operations for the Paris investment bank Lazard Frères. He first met the First Lady when he contributed the Aubusson rug for the French Empire–inspired Red Room. After President Kennedy's death, Meyer became one of Jacqueline's closest friends.

79
. P
IERRE
M
ENDèS
F
RANCE
(1907–1982) was French president from 1954 to 1955.

1
. F
IDEL
C
ASTRO
R
UZ
(1926– ) and his guerrilla army entered Havana in triumph in January 1959, having overthrown the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. That April, he visited Washington, D.C., at the invitation of the National Press Club and was refused an audience by President Eisenhower. The following year, Castro began importing Soviet oil and expropriating American firms.

2
. E
ARL
E. T. S
MITH
(1903–1991), a Newport-born sportsman and financier, of New York and Palm Beach, was ambassador to Havana from 1957 to 1959. His wife, Florence Pritchett Smith (1920–1965), had been a friend of President Kennedy's since school days.

3
. H
ERBERT
M
ATTHEWS
(1900–1977) was a
New York Times
correspondent in Cuba whose reports were criticized for being too pro-Castro.

4
. N
ORMAN
M
AILER
(1923–2007) was a novelist and essayist best known for
The Naked and the Dead
(1948). Mailer wrote the laudatory "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" in
Esquire
about JFK's victory at the 1960 convention, but the following spring, after the Bay of Pigs, he denounced the President for sponsoring the invasion and declared Castro one of his "heroes."

5
. Smith's 1962 book
The Fourth Floo
r lambasted Assistant Secretary of State Roy Rubottom and other Eisenhower officials for being too relaxed about letting Castro seize power in Cuba.

6
. A
LLEN
D
ULLES
(1893–1969) was a Wall Street lawyer and brother of Eisenhower's secretary of state who served as director of Central Intelligence from 1953 to 1961. Along with J. Edgar Hoover, he was JFK's first reappointment as President-elect—and, like Hoover, in the name of continuity. On July 23, 1960, Dulles came to Hyannis Port to brief the newly minted Democratic nominee on national security.

7
. In his 1962 memoir
Six Crises
, former Vice President Nixon insisted that during the July briefing, Dulles told Kennedy that for months, the CIA had "not only been supporting and assisting, but actually training Cuban exiles for the purpose of supporting an invasion of Cuba itself." Nixon complained that JFK had abused this access to classified information in October 1960 to criticize Eisenhower's government for failing to help "fighters for freedom" eager to overthrow Castro. In Nixon's telling, in order to preserve the operation's secrecy, he felt compelled during the debates with Kennedy to argue the other side, although in secret he had actually been a champion of CIA plans to upend Castro.

8
. Referring to the attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 by anti-Castro Cubans, backed by the CIA. The Agency had given Kennedy to believe that if the exiles, after landing, managed to establish a beachhead in Cuba, public dissatisfaction with Castro might generate a national uprising that would topple the dictator and put the exiles in power—and that if they failed, they could "melt into the mountains" of Cuba as guerrillas. None of these assurances proved accurate, which inflicted a severe blow to Kennedy's prestige. JFK's circle blamed the CIA for its faulty intelligence and planning. The CIA and its partisans blamed Kennedy for refusing to suspend his order that U.S. military forces stay out of the battle.

9
. In September 1962, Senator Kenneth Keating, New York Republican, charged that the Soviets had placed offensive missiles in Cuba and that the Kennedy administration was trying to conceal their presence. This was weeks before the CIA provided President Kennedy with the first hard evidence, gathered from U-2 photographs, of the missiles on the island.

10
. By that Sunday afternoon, April 16, 1961, six American B-26s painted with Cuban insignia had already destroyed almost half of Castro's air force. CIA officials had presumed that, once the invasion was under way, JFK would be willing to discard his public pledge not to invade Cuba and authorize U.S. military forces to openly support the freedom-fighters then landing on Cuban beaches. Rusk's call warned the President of the importance of concealing any American role in the invasion. Kennedy thus witheld U.S. air power until the exiles were established on Cuba, at which time such a strike might be plausibly explained as coming from Cuban soil. At that moment, a ban on American air strikes was likely to doom the invasion, and Kennedy knew it.

11
. L
YMAN
L
EMNITZER
(1899–1988) had been appointed by Eisenhower in 1960 as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In March 1962, Lemnitzer approved a highly classified plan, called Operation Northwoods, for the U.S. government to commit acts of terrorism in Miami and other American cities and blame them on Castro as a pretext for a full American invasion of Cuba. The plan even had suggested that if a U.S. astronaut perished during a mission, the finger should be pointed at Castro. Appalled by Lemnitzer's proposal and still fuming over the general's ham-handed advice during the Bay of Pigs, JFK denied him a second term that fall as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

12
. J
OSE
M
IRO
C
ARDONA
(1902–1974) was a Havana lawyer, professor, and prominent Batista critic who, after the revolution, was briefly Castro's prime minister before he broke with him and fled to Florida. Before the Bay of Pigs, Cardona was leader of the committee of anti-Castro Cubans who were quietly cooperating with the CIA and the tiny group of Kennedy officials involved in the forthcoming invasion. Had the Cuban exiles managed to seize a substantial portion of their island, they would have declared Cardona provisional president of Cuba.

13
. A
DOLF
B
ERLE
(1895–1971) was a law professor, economic theorist, and FDR-era diplomat who was assisting the State Department on Latin America.

14
. On Tuesday evening, April 18, JFK was summoned from the annual White House reception for Congress to the Cabinet Room, where a Caribbean map with tiny magnetic ships had been set up. Kennedy told Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of the U.S. Navy, "I don't want the United States involved in this." Burke replied, "Hell, Mr. President, we
are
involved!" As a compromise, the President allowed six jets from the U.S.S.
Essex
to fly over the invasion beachhead for an hour.

15
. M
ARK
S
HAW
(1921–1969) was one of the most well-known fashion and celebrity photographers of the time.

16
. C
ONSTANTINE
K
ARAMANLIS
(1907–1998) was prime minister of Greece. By Wednesday evening, when the Kennedys attended a Greek embassy dinner hosted by Karamanlis, the President knew that the invasion was an inescapable failure.

17
. J
OHN
M
C
C
ONE
(1902–1991) was a California businessman, chairman of Eisenhower's Atomic Energy Commission, and Nixon supporter in 1960, whom JFK appointed to succeed Allen Dulles, after firing the latter in the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster.

18
. At an April 21, 1961, press conference, the President said, "There's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan." JFK accepted full responsibility for the failure as "the responsible officer of the government." Americans rallied to him and gave him the highest Gallup Poll approval ratings of his presidency—81 percent.

19
. C
URTIS
L
E
M
AY
(1906–1990) was the truculent Air Force chief of staff, known for his leadership of World War II strategic bombing and the postwar Strategic Air Command. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, LeMay became the fiercest of those demanding that JFK start bombing Cuba immediately.

20
. Since the sunburst of recovery programs created by FDR to fight the Great Depression during the first hundred days of his presidency, this metric has been used by the press ever since to issue wildly premature assessments of new presidents.