Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (17 page)

In a letter to Rose shortly afterward, Jackie practiced her bittersweet stoicism. “Everything is getting better now—and the bad time seems far behind. All I can think of is what a close shave it was and how lucky I am to be able to have more children,” she wrote. “Everything else fades into unimportance.” It’s not hard to see the sadness behind her brave face. “Don’t worry,” she wrote. “I’ll make you a grandmother yet!”

Having built a nursery at Hickory Hill and invested the home with so much expectant joy, Jackie now associated the house with loss. She later said plainly, “I didn’t want to live there any more.” They sold Hickory Hill to Bobby and Ethel for $125,000, the same price they originally paid for it, and rented a house in Georgetown, on P Street. In March, she found out that she was once again pregnant; buoyed by the news, the couple again sought out a permanent home, and they finally settled on a Federal-era house at 3307 N Street NW in Georgetown. Built in 1812, the three-story redbrick house gave Jackie a broad canvas on which to practice what was becoming a passion of hers: redecoration.

“I remember that when she got the N Street house, it was going to be just right—it was going to be absolutely marvelous,” remembered Jackie’s mother, Janet.

It was a house with a lot of feeling about it and a lot of charm, but she did that living room, the double living room downstairs, over at least three times within the first four months they were there. I remember you could go there one day and there would be two beautiful needlepoint rugs, one in the little front drawing room and one in the back one towards the garden. The next week they would both be gone. They would have been sent on trial. Not only that, but the curtains were apt to be red chintz one week . . .

Decoration was, like many of Jackie’s other passions, an expensive one. Her ability to spend huge sums of money—on couture, on decor, on food—annoyed Jack and his family. While there were arguments and confrontations about Jackie’s spending throughout the years, it seems that the mode Jack adopted was one of bemused resignation. George Smathers quipped, “They had an entirely average marriage—she spent and he seethed.”

Jackie’s mother, Janet, told an amusing, and revealing, story from that period:

We were having dinner there one night and Jack didn’t get home until quite late, after we had finished dinner. He was having dinner on a tray. At that moment the room was entirely beige: the walls had been repainted a week or so before, and the furniture had all been upholstered in soft beige, and there was a vicuna rug over the sofa . . . And let’s see—rugs, curtains, upholstery, everything, was suddenly turned lovely different shades of beige. I knew how wildly expensive it is to paint things and upholster things and have curtains made, but I can remember Jack just saying to me, “Mrs. Auchincloss, do you think we’re prisoners of beige?”

Nesting in preparation for the baby had done much for her morale, but Jackie suffered another blow in August when her father died of liver cancer. Years of drinking had taken their toll. Jackie took charge of his obituary and funeral arrangements while Lee and her husband, Michael Canfield, flew in from Italy. On August 6, after a funeral attended by fewer than two dozen mourners (many of them Black Jack’s mistresses), John Vernou Bouvier III was laid to rest near St. Philomena’s in East Hampton, where he’d married Janet almost thirty years before. Buried next to his mother, father, and brother, his casket was covered with yellow daisies and cornflower, Jackie’s favorites.

In losing her conflicted, charismatic father, Jackie’s world had undergone a seismic shift—John F. Kennedy was now the titanic male figure in her life. Black Jack Bouvier had provided Jackie with her first and most influential picture of what a man was. Joined in Jackie’s mind with so
much love, affection, and nurturing, her father’s example provided the foundation for her most basic, unexamined ideas of what a man could and should be. In a sense, Black Jack had prepared Jackie­ to fall in love with a man like John F. Kennedy. In JFK she’d found a man with the same dangerous attractiveness, the sense of insouciant fun, the jet-set good looks and lavish lifestyle. She’d also found a man who, like her father, was incapable of being faithful.

Her world would change again only four months later, when she gave birth to Caroline Bouvier Kennedy, named after Jackie’s sister, in New York.

7

The Campaigner

Caroline, born via Caesarean the day after Thanksgiving 1957,
was a healthy girl: six pounds, seven ounces, “as robust as a sumo wrestler,” JFK proudly said. The expectant father had been waiting nervously outside the delivery room in New York’s Lying-In Hospital when he was notified that mother and child had come through the delivery with flying colors.

For Jack, the relief was intense. After Jackie’s two failed pregnancies, he feared they might never produce children, a failure which in the fecund Kennedy family would have carried a stigma. “I will always remember the sweet expression on his face and the way he smiled,” Janet would remember. “He just looked radiant when he heard that all was well.” When Jackie awakened, Jack was at her bedside, happily holding Caroline. Jack “was more emotional about Caroline’s birth than he was about anything else,” noted Lem Billings, “and I had seen him respond to a hell of a lot of emotional occasions over the years.”

The new family returned to their N Street house, along with Maud Shaw, the short, matronly, gray-haired British nurse they’d hired to help care for Caroline. Fifty-four years old when the Kennedys took her on, and a well-traveled, experienced nurse, she would stay with the Kennedys through the White House years and become an important figure in Caroline’s early life. Shaw was only one member of the household staff on whom Jackie, weakened by the Caesarean operation, depended. There was cook Pearl Nelson, who prepared all their meals; Jack’s valet, George Thomas; driver Muggsy O’Leary; and Jackie’s personal maid, Providencia “Provi” Paredes, not to mention other maids to attend to chores in the now larger household.

As her health improved, Jackie returned to her passion for decoration, enjoyed Caroline’s infanthood, and re-connected with her husband. While he hadn’t curtailed his womanizing, he and Jackie enjoyed more of a home life together during this time. Jackie also begrudgingly came to accept that, as part of a very public political family, she would have to make some concessions to a press that was constantly curious about them. She appeared with Lee in a fashion layout for
Ladies’ Home Journal
in December 1957. The accompanying article quoted her as saying—apparently with a straight face—that “I don’t like to buy a lot of clothes and have my closets full. A suit, a good little black dress with sleeves and a short evening dress—that’s all you need for travel.” Jack even convinced her, despite her reservations, to allow
Life
magazine to publish photographs of baby Caroline. (Part of the convincing included a trip to Paris in the summer of 1958.)

Jackie also solidified her importance as a campaigner for Jack during his 1958 reelection campaign for Senate. As soon as she was well enough—and back from Paris—Jackie put in campaign appearances around Massachusetts. Apart from the tea parties that Rose and Ethel pioneered, she was a draw unto herself, and her skills with foreign languages were particularly helpful in multiethnic pockets of the state. She spoke to the Francophones in Worcester and the Italian Americans in Boston. An Italian ward politician in Boston said, “When Jackie opened her mouth and introduced herself in Italian, fluent Italian . . . all pandemonium broke loose. . . . I think her talk is actually what cemented the relationship between Senator Kennedy and the Italian-Americans in the district.” Jack himself called her “simply invaluable. In French speaking areas of the state, she is able to converse easily with them, and everyone seems to like her.” Jack handily won reelection, with 73.2 percent of the popular vote.

Jack’s campaign for the 1960 presidential nomination had, in actuality, already begun, and Jackie’s life from 1958 through the 1960 election was one long campaign. In October 1959, the couple was invited to campaign in Louisiana by a local political maven named Edmund Reggie. (Reggie’s daughter, Victoria, would become Ted Kennedy’s second wife almost thirty-five years later.) At Lafayette’s Queen of the Rice Festival, Jackie whipped the crowd into a frenzy simply by speaking French.

“Bonjour, mes amis,” she cooed.

Reggie recalled: “You could just hear the screaming. . . . It was just unbelievable, the applause, the shouting.” She went on, in French, to call Louisiana “the beautiful part of France.” “When the couple rode at the head of the parade afterward,” Sarah Bradford wrote, “the screaming of the crowds was deafening; women ran out of the crowd to speak to Jackie in French.” Jack seemed to be appreciative of what his wife offered on the campaign trail. On the way to the airport, Reggie reported, the Kennedys “were just like little lovebirds . . . almost to the point of embarrassment on my part.”

Though hindsight has conferred upon his presidency a sheen of youthful and vital inevitability, Jack’s nomination and eventual victory were far from a sure thing. The press and the public worried about Jack’s youth—he would be the youngest president ever to take office, if elected—and his unexceptional record as a legislator. Further, our country had never had a Catholic president, and there was real concern, and not just on the fringe, that a Catholic president would be a puppet of the Vatican. No matter how much money his father sank into the campaign—and he would sink millions—Jack had to get out and convince the electorate—which meant a long and hard-fought campaign.

For Jackie, this meant an engagement with her old enemy: politics. Not only did campaigning and senatorial work take Jack away from her, she also disliked so much about the aesthetics of politics: the rowdiness of the crowds, the insincere hand-shaking and back-slapping, the two-faced interactions that occurred throughout political life, even among nominal allies. She disliked the cynicism and the enemies lists and the pandering to the lowest common denominator. She hated the unsettled, peripatetic life that politics so often engendered.

But she was no shrinking violet, nor was she deluded about the life and the family into which she’d chosen to marry. On January 2, 1960, Jack announced his campaign for the presidency, which found her becoming a player in Jack’s political life. Not only did she come to realize her own strengths as a campaigner, Jack and his political apparatus came to see the qualities that made her so valuable. Barbara Perry notes that this was part of a historic shift that took place during the 1960 election. Where first ladies (and aspiring first ladies) had not previously played much of a
part in presidential campaigns, “candidates’ spouses in the 1960 election (including Mesdames Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey, Nixon, and Lodge) set precedents for active participation in their husbands’ campaigns, which helped define the prominent political role of modern first ladies in the late twentieth century.”

Jackie had a star power of her own. Men wanted to be around her for obvious reasons, but Jackie was also a great draw to women, who loved her graceful manner and the understated elegance of her wardrobe. She was a greatly aspirational figure—women wanted to be like her—and this gave her a great deal of power when it came to getting out the female vote. This was most visible in her launching the “Calling for Kennedy” week in October, during which women supporting Kennedy would poll their friends on the most important issues of the day and “answer any questions they may have about my husband.” It was explicitly to gather women’s ideas on matters of policy, but the effort, which according to Jackie brought in thousands of responses from women all over the country, doubled neatly as a get-out-the-vote initiative in the last weeks before the election. The female vote was not a trivial matter, and the Kennedy campaign knew it: In 1960 “there were over three million more voting-age women than men,” Kennedy family biographer Laurence Leamer noted, “and Jack’s success or failure would inevitably rest in part on how well he did with women voters.”

According to several in the Kennedy circle, though, what Jack valued most in Jackie was her tremendous gift for sizing people up. Arthur Schlesinger recalled that “underneath a veil of lovely inconsequence, she concealed tremendous awareness, an all-seeing eye and a ruthless judgment.” John Kenneth Galbraith praised her “judgment of people,” which was “something on which I think JFK depended.” He goes on:

He tended to take people at their face value, she looked at them much more scrupulously to see what they were up to, to distinguish between those who had something from those who were promoting themselves. . . . For all the people that I have known, she had the shrewdest eye for a phony or somebody who was engaged in self-advancement, and she didn’t conceal it.

Jackie’s power on the trail was somewhat diluted by a curtailed campaigning schedule. That spring she found out that she was again pregnant, and, having lost two previous pregnancies, neither she nor Jack wanted her to risk overexertion. And the campaign trail was a wearying slog: “About the fifth day out,” she’d later say, “it’s just sheer exhaustion.” She wasn’t present in Los Angeles when Jack accepted his party’s nomination in July, staying in Hyannis Port with Caroline, but she stayed active in campaigning on the road, at least intermittently, until September. Even after she mostly eliminated her campaign travels, she wrote a weekly column called “Campaign Wife,” which the DNC syndicated to newspapers around the country. When Jackie’s habit of wearing French couture became a point of controversy—she should be wearing American designers, critics said—Jackie was able to respond in her column. “All the talk over what I wear and how I fix my hair has amused me and puzzled me. What does my hairdo have to do with my husband’s ability to be President?” Jackie knew quite well what an asset she was to her husband’s campaign, but she was all too happy to feign irrelevancy when such criticisms arose.

The Kennedy family spent the night of the election (“the longest night in history,” Jackie later called it) in Hyannis Port, huddled around a portable television watching the returns. Though initial returns were promising, the numbers grew closer and closer throughout the night. Jackie went to bed at 11:30, with Nixon pulling even, and Jack followed at 3:00 a.m. Though the Secret Service quietly created a security perimeter around the Hyannis compound at 5:45 a.m., it wasn’t until 9:30 the next morning that Jack could be sure of his victory. The margin was shockingly small: Though Kennedy had won “303 electoral votes to Nixon’s 219, his popular margin was a scant 118,574 out of 68,837,000 votes cast.” It wasn’t the narrowest victory in presidential history, but it was close.

Just weeks later, on November 27, Jackie gave birth to John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. Almost a month premature, he spent the first five days of his life in an incubator, fighting off a respiratory infection while his mother, exhausted from another Caesarean and the campaign hangover, recovered in bed. The two were not released from the hospital until December 9, the same day Jackie was scheduled to be given a tour of the White House by outgoing First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. Jackie’s doctor permitted
the tour only on the condition that she be in a wheelchair, but when she arrived at the White House, none was waiting. Mrs. Eisenhower had stipulated to White House chief usher J. B. West that one could be available, but “behind a door somewhere, out of sight,” only available should Mrs. Kennedy request it. Jackie later admitted to West that she’d been too cowed by Mamie to ask, and the ninety-minute tour of her soon-to-be home, daunting to someone in the best of health, left her pale and in great pain and resulted, she later told friends, in a “two-hour crying jag.” Jackie immediately headed to Palm Beach, where she’d spend the next two weeks in bed.

“The month after the baby’s birth had been the opposite of recuperation,” she’d later write to Rose:

I was ill and recuperating in the room I shared with dear Jack. He was writing his inaugural speech in the room; I remember the yellow pages being strewn all around. . . . Then Pierre Salinger or someone would come in the room and have conferences with Jack, so I’d go sit in the bathroom ’till it was over. . . . I didn’t come to meals—I couldn’t hold any food down.

Laura Bergquist, a writer for
Look
magazine, came to interview the first-lady-to-be about which first lady she admired most. Too sick to attend the interview herself, Jackie convinced Jack to answer in her place. “I said Mrs. Truman . . .” Jackie wrote to Rose. “She kept her family together in the White House . . . under the bright hot heat of the limelight that suddenly hits a president. She kept her own values as before. That is what I wanted to do more than anything. I didn’t want to go into coal mines ([like] Mrs. Roosevelt) or be a symbol of elegance ([like] Dolly Madison). I just wanted to have a normal life for Jack and the children and me. And even if lots of beautiful things happened there later . . . my first fight was to fight for a sane and normal life for my babies and their father.”

Jackie used this time of convalescence to begin researching the history of the White House, the restoration of which she was already beginning to envision. “I felt,” she later wrote, “the President’s house should
stand for—in every field—what Jack always stood for: excellence.”

“From her bed [Jackie] is trying to plan the moving of her young family into the White House—and gather her strength to start out there,” Rose wrote in her diary at the time. “She has strong feelings about many facets of her new life. She has sent for all books and magazine articles of the White House in the past, from the Library of Congress.” Jackie was interested in improving the White House’s decor, but she was also a woman keen to find out how other families survived in such unique circumstances. It was imperative to her that growing up in the White House not warp, spoil, or confuse her children. In the midst of all the commotion, Jackie enjoyed the company of Caroline’s cat, Tom Kitten. Unfortunately, JFK was allergic to cats, and after Jack started sneezing, the cat was consigned to the basement.

A pressing issue, as the inauguration approached, was who would design Jackie’s clothes. The clamor over her (and her mother-in-law’s) preference for French styles had never entirely died down, and there was pressure from several quarters for her to buy only American-designed and -made clothes. The perfect compromise was found in designer Oleg Cassini, a Palm Beach golfing buddy of Joe Kennedy’s and a naturalized White Russian aristocrat. Jackie presented him with sketches from a variety of American designers and he designed and constructed clothes for her specifically. Cassini later insisted that the role of style icon did not interest her; nevertheless, their partnership would help define women’s fashion in the 1960s.