Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy (53 page)

2
. In January 1963, de Gaulle abruptly vetoed British membership in the European Common Market, saying the organization would otherwise appear to be "under American domination and direction."

3
. The
Mona Lisa
came to Washington in January 1963.

4
. The
force de frappe
refers to the independent nuclear deterrent that de Gaulle was trying to create.

5
. In October 1963, after their Greek cruise on the Onassis yacht, Mrs. Kennedy and her sister Lee stopped in Morocco. Irritated by de Gaulle's rebuffs of her husband's efforts to improve French-American relations, as well as her own, she balked at a stop in Paris on the way home.

6
. In December 1961, the sanctimonious Nehru ordered his troops to seize Portugal's colony of Goa, which lay on India's west coast, surrounded by Indian territory. The Indian prime minister labored to explain how this differed from the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

7
. A
DALBERT
de S
EGONZAC
(1920–2002) was Washington correspondent of
France-Soir
.

8
. Stéphane Boudin, who was advising her on the White House restoration.

9
. The cigar-chomping John "Muggsy" O'Leary (1913–1987) was JFK's driver during the Senate years, then an agent for the Secret Service.

10
. De Gaulle said that the missile crisis had shown that when the crunch came, the United States was willing to act on its own, and therefore might not reliably fulfill its commitments to defend Western Europe.

11
. When President Johnson's diplomats tried to make good on de Gaulle's promise, the French president refused to schedule a visit to America, insisting that his attendance at Kennedy's funeral had already fulfilled his pledge.

12
. After the funeral, Jacqueline received de Gaulle in the Yellow Oval Room and told him that everyone had become so bitter about "this France, England, America thing," but "Jack was never bitter." De Gaulle allowed that President Kennedy had had great influence around the world. With her insistence that every nuance be right, at six that morning, before walking to the service in St. Matthew's, Mrs. Kennedy had called the White House curator and asked him to replace the Cézannes from the Yellow Oval Room with American nineteenth-century aquatints: she wanted the atmosphere for her meetings with de Gaulle and several other foreign leaders to be not French but American. De Gaulle's relationship with JFK had not been wholly negative. During the missile crisis, when Dean Acheson offered to show the French president photographic evidence proving that Soviet missiles were in Cuba, de Gaulle replied that Kennedy's word was good enough for him.

13
.
Étienne Burin des Roziers
(1913– ) had served under de Gaulle since World War II.

14
. C
HARLES
"
CHIP
" B
OHLEN
(1904–1974) was an old Soviet hand who became JFK's second ambassador to France.

15
. J
EAN
M
ONNET
(1888–1979) was considered the architect of an integrated post–World War II Europe. Upset that there was no proper award for civilian achievement, only military, President Kennedy had established the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, but did not live to present it to its first recipients, including Monnet, in December 1963.

16
. De Gaulle hosted Macmillan at the French diplomatic retreat Château Rambouillet in December 1962.

17
. A
MINTORE
F
ANFANI
(1908–1999) was Italian prime minister for most of the Kennedy years, the third of his five tours of duty in that job. As leader of his Christian Democratic party, he had attended the Democratic convention of 1956 as an observer.

18
. J
OSIP
B
ROZ TITO
(1892–1980), the unifying founder and strongman president of Yugoslavia, was given a luncheon by JFK at the White House in October 1963. Mrs. Kennedy was still in Greece.

19
. V
IJAYA
L
AKSHMI PANDIT
(1900–1990) was sent by her brother, Prime Minister Nehru, to London, Moscow, and Washington as his ambassador.

20
. M
OHAMMAD
A
YUB KHAN
(1907–1974), president of Pakistan from 1958 to 1969, was the leader for whom the Kennedys had arranged their glittering dinner at Mount Vernon in 1961.

21
. W
ALTER
M
CCONAUGHY
(1908–2000) was a career Foreign Service officer who had previously served in Burma and South Korea, and was the American ambassador to Pakistan from 1962 to 1966. The State Department wished to suggest that, as with New Delhi, the President had sent an old friend to Islamabad.

22
. W
ILLIAM
M
CCORMICK BLAIR
(1916– ) was an investment banking heir and close Stevenson aide who became Kennedy's ambassador to Denmark. William Battle (1920–2008), who had helped to rescue JFK in the South Pacific during World War II, was his ambassador to Australia.

23
. The postcolonial Republic of the Congo suffered domestic upheavals during the Kennedy years. Edmund Gullion (1913–1998) and William Attwood (1919–1989) were JFK's ambassadors to the Congo and Guinea, respectively. In 1963, Kennedy considered Gullion for ambassador to South Vietnam before choosing Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., whom he had defeated to enter the U.S. Senate in 1952.

24
. In the summer of 1963, President Diem was cracking down on critics, especially Buddhists. When a Buddhist priest burned himself on a Saigon street, Diem's cold-blooded sister-in-law, Tran Le Xuan (1924–2011), known as Madame Nhu, dismissed the event as a "barbecue." That summer and fall, the President was forced to think seriously about how much he wished to use American military force to support a South Vietnamese leadership that, although anti-Communist, was growing more erratic, autocratic, and corrupt. He approved a coup d'état by South Vietnamese military officers against the Diem brothers, which went out of control and culminated in their assassination. Madame Nhu blamed Kennedy for the deaths of her husband and brother-in-law. When JFK died, American policy toward Vietnam was at a pivot point. In ironic retrospect, this historical moment was like the one Kennedy had asked Professor Donald about. For Lincoln, it was what decisions he would have made about Reconstruction, had he lived, and whether they would have changed history. For Kennedy, the question was about Vietnam.

25
. During their lunch in 1962, Mrs. Luce grandly told him that every president could be described "in one sentence," and that she had been wondering what his sentence would be.

26
. Tish Baldrige had worked for Mrs. Luce in Rome. She had not looked forward to watching her former boss do battle with her current boss over this luncheon.

27
. Not to mention, antagonizing Mrs. Luce's powerful husband.

28
. W
AYNE
M
ORSE
(1900–1974) was a Democratic senator from Oregon and JFK colleague on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. After Mrs. Luce's stint in Italy, Eisenhower had nominated her for ambassador to Brazil, but then she publicly said that Morse's bad judgment in opposing her appointment must be explained by the fact that in 1951 he had been "kicked in the head by a horse." (Morse was severely injured in the accident.) In the face of outrage from other senators, she refused to retract her insult and asked Ike to withdraw her nomination.

29
. The Luces had built a house in Phoenix. She also took up scuba diving.

30
. In April 1961.

31
. P
AUL
H
ARKINS
(1904–1984) was the American commander in Vietnam.

32
. J
ANIO
Q
UADROS
(1917–1992) was Brazilian president from January 1961 until he quit in August of that year.

33
. J
OAO
G
OULART
(1918–1976) was president of Brazil from 1961 to 1964. JFK was not delighted by Goulart's inclusion of Communist sympathizers in his government, his opposition to American sanctions against Castro, and his efforts to improve relations with Soviet-bloc countries.

34
. JFK's sister Patricia Kennedy Lawford (1924–2006) was married to the British actor Peter Lawford (1923–1984).

35
. Fernando Berckemeyer was the Peruvian ambassador.

36
. J
OHN
B
ARTLOW MARTIN
(1915–1987) was a journalist and onetime Stevenson aide who was JFK's ambassador to the Dominican Republic, which was led for seven months in 1963 by Juan Bosch Gaviño (1909–2001), the country's first legitimately elected president, who was deposed by a military coup.

37
. In his 1991 memoirs, Rusk insisted that he and JFK had had a private understanding from the start that he could only afford to serve one term at State. But if this was true, it was obviously unknown to Jacqueline, and Rusk clearly changed his mind, since he continued for five more years in the job under President Johnson.

38
. Nigerian slave brokers once used Portuguese coins to create ornamental "slave bracelets"—not the most helpful image for a U.S. diplomat at a time of tumult in his country over civil rights.

39
. The orotund Chester Bowles was Kennedy's first undersecretary of state, George Ball the second.

40
. W
ALT
R
OSTOW
(1916–2003) was a development economist at MIT, then Bundy's deputy before going to State as director of policy planning.

41
. J
EROME
W
IESNER
(1915–1994) had been MIT's president when JFK appointed him as his science adviser.

42
. L
LEWELLYN
"
TOMMY
" T
HOMPSON
(1904–1972), son of Colorado sheep ranchers, joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1929 and came to specialize in the Soviet Union, serving as ambassador to Moscow from 1957 to 1962. At the start of the missile crisis, JFK had wanted Bohlen to delay his departure. He knew Bohlen well and that, as ambassador to Moscow from 1953 to 1957, Bohlen had developed a sophisticated understanding of Khrushchev and his circle. Instead it was Thompson who advised JFK during the missile crisis. Although the President had been little acquainted with him, as it turned out, the self-effacing Thompson was in a position to provide insights on the Soviet leadership that were of more recent vintage than Bohlen's.

43
. W
ALTER
H
ELLER
(1915–1987), chairman of Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisors, was the Buffalo-born son of German immigrants and a University of Minnesota economist.

44
. D
AVID
B
ELL
(1919–2000) and Kermit Gordon (1916–1976) were Kennedy's successive chiefs of what was then called the Bureau of the Budget.

45
. In November 1961, JFK had created the Agency for International Development, which dispensed foreign aid and was suffering growing pains.

46
. F
OWLER
H
AMILTON
(1911–1984) was Kennedy's first AID administrator.

47
. H
ENRY
L
ABOUISSE
(1904–1987), known as "Harry," a social friend of the Kennedys, had been chief of AID's forerunner agency and became JFK's ambassador to Greece in 1962.

48
. B
YRON
W
HITE
(1917–2002) was an All-American football halfback from Colorado, where he gained the nickname "Whizzer," and a Rhodes Scholar whom JFK had met in London before World War II. By coincidence, he was one of the naval intelligence officers who wrote reports on Kennedy's heroism commanding the PT-109. White joined the Supreme Court in April 1962 and proved more conservative than Kennedy and his people had expected.

49
. P
AUL
F
REUND
(1908–1992), a Harvard Law School professor and giant of constitutional law, turned down President Kennedy's invitation to be solicitor general. JFK also considered him for the high court before choosing Arthur Goldberg.

50
. W
ILLIAM
O
. DOUGLAS
(1898–1980), liberal, civil libertarian, and environmentalist, had been a close Kennedy family friend since his work with Joseph Kennedy on the Securities Exchange Commission in the 1930s.