Kati Marton (21 page)

If there was something Jackie was bred to understand and appreciate, it was power, how to acquire it—for women then, almost always through marriage—and how to keep it. “You know she had a marvelous facility for enlisting the help of all those whose help she wanted,” Lady Bird recalled. “She was the most beguiling little girl and in need of help. And I think if I were a man I’d be rushing even faster to her side. But she had that effect on women too. I know I wanted to help her in any way I could.” The whispery voice and the shy, demure, tentative tilt of her head were calculated to make her seem unthreatening, vulnerable. For Jackie was a young woman of her time and her class, constrained like strong women through the ages to camouflage her strength. Where Eleanor Roosevelt generally went straight for her goal, Jackie was indirect,
oblique and used feminine wiles in a way Eleanor would have found intensely uncomfortable. But like Mrs. Roosevelt, she understood the power of her position and was unafraid to use it when she cared to.

When she learned that noted art collector Walter Annenberg of Philadelphia was in possession of a Benjamin Franklin portrait she thought belonged in the White House, she picked up the telephone. “Mr. Annenberg, today you are the first citizen of Philadelphia,” she began, “and in his day Benjamin Franklin was the first citizen of Philadelphia. That is why, Mr. Annenberg, I thought of you. Do you think that a great Philadelphia citizen would give the White House a portrait of another great Philadelphia citizen?” In just a few days, the famous David Martin portrait of a scholarly, aging Franklin was hanging over the mantel of the Green Room. In much the same way, she persuaded Clark Clifford to join her cause. “You always come to the rescue …,” she wrote the famed Washington lawyer, “so I would be eternally gratified if you would keep me out of debtor’s prison and make this work.” And of course he did, establishing the Fine Arts Committee for the White House to locate art and antiques and to raise funds for their purchase.

On February 14, 1962, she unveiled her newly renovated White House to the nation. In a television special that broke viewing records, she walked CBS correspondent Charles Collingwood through a White House that seemed both transformed and very much hers. In her demure, highly cultured voice, she captivated the nation with her earnestness and her command of history. She seemed the perfect custodian for the nation’s heritage. “We have such a great civilization,” she said with seemingly childlike wonder. There was something arresting about this chic young woman displaying such understated authority. When, at the end of the tour, the president joined her, he seemed stiff and scripted by comparison.

Jack ceded decisions regarding the White House mostly to his wife. His interest in art and music was largely limited to drawings of sailboats, show tunes and jazz. He had no interest in classical music and was known to doze off at concerts. “Pablo Casals?” he asked a friend after the legendary cellist’s White House concert. “I didn’t know what the hell
he played. Someone had to tell me.” Jackie dressed not only the house but her husband as well. She turned the president from “a slob into a dude,” in his friend Ben Bradlee’s words.

Jackie donned what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., calls her “veil of inconsequence” when she set her sights on a goal, almost always achieving what she sought. She had drive and focus and, when she wanted to apply it, incandescent charm. When she learned that historic Lafayette Square across Pennsylvania Avenue was about to be destroyed to make way for modern office buildings, she leaped into action. “The whole thing seemed to be going down the drain,” William Walton recalled, “when Jackie stepped in and told us, ‘You white-livered characters need some help and I’m going to get involved. The wreckers haven’t started yet, and until they do, it can be saved.’ Without her … we never would have saved the Square….” She enlisted the help of eminent architect John Carl Warnecke to draw up a plan to provide the needed office space while still preserving the old homes on the lovely square. Warnecke proposed keeping the nineteenth-century facades but placing redbrick buildings behind the row house. “[Jackie’s] focus was preserving that character that revealed the history of the beginning of our country,” Warnecke said. “She had the gut instincts to know what to approve and what not to. The odds were against Jacqueline Kennedy, although she believed firmly that she could change not only the minds of the world’s leading architects but the actual direction of architecture in the United States …. [At the] public presentation of the design … with Jackie’s presence at the press conference … it received Fine Arts Commission approval.”

But for all her success, Jackie prized her privacy and her freedom too much to get drawn too far into any cause. “We were always trying to get her to do things which she wouldn’t do,” August Hecksher, the administration’s cultural adviser, noted. “I remember being disappointed, for example, when I finally did persuade Mrs. Kennedy to invite some poets who were gathering in Washington for a convocation at the Library of Congress to come to the White House … and she agreed to that …. And that fall just at the time of the Cuban [missile] crisis she canceled it ….” Her role as wife and mother always came first. “She was very affectionate in referring to the President and I was struck by it. We were
discussing some dinner that was to be held and she said, ‘Well we can do it almost any time but not in the early weeks of April, because that’s going to be Jack’s vacation and I want to keep that absolutely clear.’”

The first lady’s willfulness was a fact of life in the White House. Jackie made it plain that she would be available for “kings and queens but not banana republic presidents.” They were to be given “the PBO,” the polite brush-off. When, pleading fatigue, she gave the president of Brazil the PBO and was photographed water-skiing with astronaut John Glenn, Robin Duke, the wife of Chief of Protocol Angier Biddle Duke, was left to explain. “The president [of Brazil] took me to task. ‘Very interesting, your story about Mrs. Kennedy.’ He just scoured the floor with me. Jackie was only interested in stars, and loved the trappings of royalty,” Mrs. Duke recalled. “I remember one state dinner she was so busy having fun and talking to Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie in French and ignoring the other guests. I tried to get her attention but she just ignored me until I was forced to grab her sleeve. She was very annoyed. And she was not nice to other women, the ones who were not chic, the decent human beings who bought their dresses at Lord and Taylor, not Givenchy. If that woman looked like a mud fence, that was the end of that woman for Jackie.”

When the king of Saudi Arabia and the president of Ireland both presented her with horses, Angie Duke was again dispatched by the president to reason with her and explain that she could not accept gifts of such value from heads of state. “I understand what you’re saying, Angie,” Jackie answered demurely. “But there’s a problem. I want the horses.” She kept the horses.

FOR JACK KENNEDY,
boredom was an enemy, and with Jackie he was never bored. “He was very attentive, flirtatious [with women],” Walton recalled, “but if a woman bored him, he would drop her quicker than any known man. He often would talk across a very beautiful girl because she didn’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain.” Jackie knew how to keep his interest. She memorized poems like “John Brown’s Body” and would recite them for his amusement. Her drawings were almost as sharp as her wit. On the occasion of their wedding anniversary,
she drew one showing her putting on face cream at her dressing table while he growled from under the sheets, “I demand my marital rights!” When tensions ran high, she left cartoons and limericks for her husband in unexpected places. Upstairs in the White House, she created a sacrosanct refuge. “I think the best thing I could do was to be a distraction. Jack lived and breathed politics all day long. If he came home to more table thumping, how could he ever relax?”

Chief Usher J. B. West described the Kennedys’ routine. “After lunch, the Kennedy children were bedded down, the maids and houseman scuttled away, silence reigned upstairs at the White House. During those hours, the Kennedy doors were closed. No telephone calls were allowed, no folders sent up, no interruptions from the staff.” In the evening, Jackie summoned friends who amused Jack for cozy dinners full of gossip and humor and substance. There, she would do her latest impersonations—say, of the French ambassador doing his impersonation of de Gaulle—or dance the twist with Robert McNamara. “If you put busy men in an attractive atmosphere where the surroundings are comfortable,” she recalled, “the food is good, you relax, you unwind, there’s some stimulating conversation. You know, sometimes quite a lot can happen.”

Jacqueline’s social ease was important to her husband. Jack’s parents had been frozen out of Boston’s WASP establishment and had socialized mostly with other Irish Catholics. But Jack patterned his behavior after the Brahmins of Boston. Though he wanted to break out of his parents’ Irish ghetto, he had no illusions about the Anglo-Saxon world he aspired to. When the
Boston Globe
revealed that his brother Teddy had cheated on a Spanish test at Harvard, the president told Bradlee, “It won’t go over with the WASPs. They take a dim view of looking over your shoulder at someone else’s exam paper. They go in more for stealing from stockholders and banks.” Jackie referred to this attitude as her husband’s “immigrant side.”

He admired Jackie’s effortless polish and her ability to snub the rich and famous at will. While touring India and Pakistan, she worried about her horse Sardar, the gift of the president of Pakistan. Jack cabled his wife playfully, “Dave [Powers], Kenny [O’Donnell], Ted [Sorensen], Taz [JFK’s naval aide Tazewell Sheppard], Bob [McNamara], Dean
[Rusk] and Mac [Bundy] are doing nothing but taking care of Sardar—don’t worry. All love, Jack.”

He was not a man to say so, but his pride in her grew as he observed his wife’s impact on the country. Jackie was changing the way American women dressed, entertained, spoke, the games they played and the books they read. Because she liked those small, intimate dinners, hostesses from New York to San Francisco began to favor cozy dinner parties around small, round tables, like hers. Waterskiing became a favorite middle-class sport after Jackie was pictured on water skis. The pillbox hat and the sleeveless sheath replaced the floral froufrou of Mamie’s day. French, the first lady’s second language and culture, became fashionable to learn and to speak. Just about anything Gallic was in. Sometimes Jack was even slightly envious of his wife’s influence and certainly of her linguistic ability, which he did not share.

While Kennedy loved the elegant image she presented the world, he did not like paying for it. Bradlee recalled, “I remember a couple of nights, the two of them arguing about her bills. He had some guy come over and look at her books. He said she spent $40,000 on clothes. That stunned him. I don’t think he ever bought anything.”

They shared a romantic view of history. “You must think of him as this little boy,” Jackie later told the journalist Theodore White, “sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history, reading [about] the Knights of the Round Table …. For Jack, history was full of heroes.” When
Camelot
became a Broadway hit, Jackie used to play the show’s music for him at night. Jack’s favorite Shakespearean tragedy was
Henry V,
which his wife said “reminds me of him, though I don’t think he knows that!” Kennedy’s favorite verse from the play was the king’s Saint Crispin’s Day speech when Henry addresses his army on the morning of the great battle. The lines are revealing about the Kennedys’ view of themselves and their role in history.

She wrote the actor Basil Rathbone asking him to recite the speech from
Henry V
at a state dinner, “for whatever lovely dreams of leading or being led on to victory lurk in his [JFK’s] soul …of all the speeches that make you care and want to make the extra effort—sacrifice, fight or die—this is the one. The only person I would not wish you to say it in front of was Khrushchev, as we are not united in purpose.”

Her obsession with style could blind her to other qualities. She once dismissed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Lyman Lemnitzer with a breezy “We all thought well of him until he made the mistake of coming into the White House one Saturday morning in a sport jacket.” And the selfishness and self-indulgence would reemerge periodically. When, after the stressful Vienna summit, Kennedy’s painful backaches left him using crutches, Jackie took off on a Greek vacation without him. Jack’s aversion to the Virginia horse-and-hunting scene did not discourage the first lady from building a house there or retreating to it whenever she felt like it. When she missed her husband’s forty-fifth birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden, at which the president was serenaded by Marilyn Monroe, wearing her now famous beaded and diaphanous dress, Jackie said it was because she had to attend a horse show.