Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy (51 page)

8
. J
AWAHARLAL
N
EHRU
(1889–1964), the Indian prime minister and Gandhi lieutenant who had been imprisoned during his country's independence struggle, came to the United States in November 1961. Kennedy found Nehru grimly unaffected by his charm. He later called it "the worst head-of-state visit I have had." (Actually Nehru was merely a head of government.)

9
. From the Newport naval station, the Kennedys took Nehru to the Auchincloss estate, Hammersmith Farm.

10
. His sister Patricia.

11
. In fact, it was 1951.

12
. During his visit to Southeast Asia, Kennedy greatly annoyed the commander of French forces in Indochina, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, by asking why the Vietnamese should want to give their lives merely so that their country would remain a French possession.

13
. A
NGIER
B
IDDLE DUKE
(1915–1995) was a tobacco heir and diplomat who served as JFK's chief of protocol.

14
. I
NDIRA
G
ANDHI
(1917–1984) later succeeded her father as Indian prime minister.

15
. L
EMOYNE
B
ILLINGS
(1916–1981), a New York advertising executive, had been Kennedy's friend since their time at Choate School. Mrs. Kennedy told the chief of the Executive Mansion's household staff that Billings had been their houseguest "every weekend since I've been married."

16
. Meaning the Yellow Oval Room in the family quarters, which Jacqueline was transforming into an elegant parlor.

17
. V
ENGALIL
K
RISHNAN KRISHNA MENON
(1896–1974) was Nehru's defense minister and an impassioned critic of U.S. foreign policy.

18
. M
ARIAN
C
ANNON SCHLESINGER
(1912– ) was the painter daughter of a Harvard physiology teacher, who indeed endorsed Stevenson in 1960.

19
. "Can't you control your wife? Or are you like me?"

20
. When Schlesinger announced his support of JFK before the 1960 convention, some old friends and Stevenson backers denounced him as a Benedict Arnold.

21
. This refers to Mrs. Kennedy's official visit to India of March 1962, which she diplomatically balanced afterward with a stopover in the country's rival, Pakistan.

22
. K
RISHNA
N
EHRU HUTHEESING
(1907–1967)
,
a writer, was the prime minister's youngest sister.

23
. Meaning the future Kennedy Library.

24
. In the fall of 1961, after the Vienna summit, the Berlin Crisis, and the building of the Berlin Wall, Khrushchev tried to demonstrate Soviet might by ordering the largest nuclear test explosions ever. A furious JFK felt compelled to resume U.S. testing.

25
. B
ERTRAND
R
USSELL
(1872–1970) was a British pacifist, philosopher, and Nobel laureate in literature.

26
. D
AVID
L
AWRENCE
(1888–1973) was a conservative journalist and founder of
U.S. News & World Report
.

27
. In 1958.

28
. Actually in October 1963.

29
. Mrs. Kennedy did not know Macmillan remotely as well as the President had, but after Kennedy's death, she achieved a moving kind of intimacy with her husband's British friend by letter. At the end of January 1964, at midnight, she wrote Macmillan by hand in response to his condolence letter: "Sometimes I become so bitter, only alone—I don't tell anyone—but I do truly think that any poor school child looking at the record of the 1960s—could only decide that virtue is UNrewarded. The two greatest men of our time, you and Jack—all you fought for and cared about together. . . . And how does it all turn out? De Gaulle is there . . . and bitter old Adenauer—and the two people who have had to suffer are you and Jack. . . . You worked together for the finest things in the finest years—later on when a series of disastrous Presidents of the United States, and Prime Ministers who were not like you, will have botched up everything—people will say Do you remember those days—how perfect they were?' The days of you and Jack. . . . I always keep thinking of Camelot—which is overly sentimental—but I know I am right—for one brief shining moment there was Camelot—and it will never be that way again. . . . Please forgive this endless intrusion—but I just wanted to tell you how much Jack loved you—and I have not his gift of concision." Macmillan replied, "My dear Friend—this is how I used to write to Jack—so I am going to write it to you. . . . You have written from your heart to me, and I will do the same. . . . Of course one becomes bitter. How could you not be? . . . May God Bless you, my dear child. You have shown the most wonderful courage to the bitter outer world. The hard thing is really to feel it inside." On June 1, 1964, the day before this oral history interview, Jacqueline reported to Macmillan that she was feeling better now and the worst had passed. Later she wrote him that she was trying to raise her children as Jack would have wished—and that if she prevailed, then that would be her vengeance against the world. (This was one reason why, in later years, Jacqueline was particularly cheered when told by friends that she had succeeded as a mother.)

30
. Launched in 1962, Telstar was the first communications satellite to allow television images to be beamed across the Atlantic. On the President's forty-seventh birthday, Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy appeared from Hyannis Port (using the same CBS crew that had produced her White House tour broadcast) in an international tribute that included Macmillan, Berlin mayor Willy Brandt, and other foreign leaders.

31
. In August 1963, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Macmillan consented to a treaty to ban nuclear tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and under water. De Gaulle, eager to build his own French nuclear deterrent, refused to sign it. (JFK privately carped at the time that de Gaulle would be remembered for one thing—his failure to accept that treaty.) Despite Kennedy's large efforts, the document did not preclude underground testing, but it represented the first serious mutual effort by Americans and Soviets to control the Cold War nuclear arms competition that threatened the planet from 1949 until 1991. Especially after the almost-apocalypse of the missile crisis, Kennedy considered it his proudest achievement. He signed it on October 7, 1963, in the Victorian splendor of Jacqueline's new Treaty Room.

32
. A
RTHUR
D
EAN
(1899–1980), William Foster (1897–1984), and John McCloy had all been asked by JFK to help to negotiate a test ban treaty with the Soviets.

33
. W
.
A
VERELL HARRIMAN
(1891–1986) was the son and heir of one of the late nineteenth century's most famous railroad barons. He served as Franklin Roosevelt's wartime ambassador to Moscow and governor of New York before he was a high official in JFK's State Department. The President sent Harriman to Moscow to demonstrate the seriousness of his commitment to achieving a treaty and was impressed by Harriman's brilliant success. In December 1963, he lent his Georgetown house to Mrs. Kennedy for her family to use as they waited to move into their new home.

34
. T
HEODORE
W
HITE
(1915–1986), a friend of JFK's who had overlapped with him at Harvard and wrote the landmark book on presidential politics,
The Making of the President, 1960
. In that volume, White wrote that "no man proved more capable of exercising the end form of American power around the globe" than Harriman, but that "no man proved more incapable of understanding American domestic politics" than Harriman.

35
. In fact, it was not the political end for Harriman. He soldiered on as a senior diplomat for the two Democratic presidents who followed John Kennedy.

36
. National Archives of the United States.

37
. Eminent officials of the Kennedy government attended what came to be called "Hickory Hill seminars" (named for the venue of the first), which were held in various of their homes. Organized by Schlesinger, an academic would lecture and take questions on his own expertise. The evening with the Lincoln historian David Herbert Donald (1920–2009) took place in the Yellow Oval Room.

38
. After Khrushchev promised to withdraw his missiles from Cuba, JFK ruminated to Robert Kennedy that it might be the night to go to the theater, referring to Lincoln's assassination in Ford's Theatre at the zenith of his political reputation. Robert replied that if he did, he would want to go with him.

39
. I
SAIAH
B
ERLIN
(1909–1997) was a British diplomat and historian who had served in Moscow during World War II.

40
. M
AUD
A
LICE BURKE
(1872–1948), known as Lady Emerald Cunard, born in America, was a famous pre–World War II London hostess.

41
. The French ambassador was intensely jealous of Ormsby-Gore's extraordinary relationship with the Kennedys. The President and First Lady placed some distance between themselves and the Alphands also because of de Gaulle's growing resistance to JFK's overtures and efforts to keep France firmly in the Western Alliance.

42
. U T
HANT
(1909–1974) was a Burmese diplomat who served as secretary-general of the UN from 1961 to 1971.

43
. Kennedy met with Macmillan for three days at the Lyford Cay Club in the Bahamas in December 1962. Before the meeting, the United States, citing technical problems, had cancelled its program to build Skybolt missiles, which had been promised to the U.K. for its nuclear deterrent force. When this was announced by the British defense minister, Peter Thorneycroft, Macmillan suffered political embarrassment—especially with Parliament critics who complained that he was too close and subservient to Kennedy. At Nassau, the President tried to bolster Macmillan by offering him Polaris missiles in return for lease of a submarine base near Glasgow. After the meeting, Ormsby-Gore accompanied the Kennedys to Palm Beach. There General Godfrey McHugh (1911–1997), the President's air force aide, made his inopportune report that whatever technical difficulties Skybolt had suffered, they had evidently vanished. Mortified to have injured Macmillan, JFK asked the Columbia political scientist Richard Neustadt to investigate the gaffe. Studying Neustadt's report with fascination in November 1963, Kennedy urged Jackie to read it.

44
. By JFK's death.

45
. R
OGER
B
LOUGH
(1904–1985) was board chairman of U.S. Steel from 1955 to 1969. In March 1962, the Kennedy Administration brokered an agreement with the Steelworkers Union and industry chieftains to hold down wage and price increases that were potentially inflationary. But in April 1962 Blough told JFK that U.S. Steel was raising prices by 3.5 percent, thereby violating the deal. Most other large steel firms did the same. Furious, the President felt betrayed. He publicly denounced the steel men as enemies of the public interest. Robert Kennedy opted for what he called "hardball." He had a grand jury consider antitrust indictments, and ordered the FBI to "interview them all—march into their offices the next day" and, with the benefit of subpoena, to examine the moguls' expense accounts and other personal records for evidence of unlawful collusion. (In this effort, the FBI called a reporter at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., which brought public complaints about brutal tactics.) Clark Clifford and other administration officials badgered the steel men to rescind their price increases. Within seventy-two hours, Blough and his colleagues backed down.

46
. Jones and Laughlin Steel Company.

47
. R
OSS
B
ARNETT
(1898–1987) was governor of Mississippi from 1960 to 1964. In September 1962, the President and attorney general bargained by telephone with the mercurial Barnett for the peaceful entrance into the University of Mississippi at Oxford of its first African-American student, James Meredith. It failed. Kennedy had to send the army to put down the resulting riots, which left two people dead.

48
. G
EORGE
W
ALLACE
(1919–1998) served the first of his four terms as governor of Alabama from 1963 until 1967. In June 1963, a month after angry dogs were set upon black teenagers demonstrating for civil rights in Birmingham, the governor announced his intention to block a judicial order to enroll two African-American students at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. In a ritual choreographed by the Kennedy brothers, who wished to avoid violence, Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door, denouncing "this illegal, unwarranted and force-induced intrusion by the federal government." Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach, backed by a federalized Alabama National Guard, asked the governor to step aside, which he did. That evening, on television, JFK announced that he was sending a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress, citing "a moral issue . . . as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution."