Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (20 page)

For the first time, a state dinner was held away from the White House when Jackie and her staff painstakingly planned a state dinner at George Washington’s residence, Mt. Vernon, for Pakistani president Ayub Khan. Jackie had been impressed when, during a state visit she and Jack made to France, President Charles de Gaulle held a dinner for them at Versailles. She wanted to bring some of that grandeur, some of that pride of history, to US state dinners, and thought Mt. Vernon, on the banks of the Potomac, would be a perfect choice. It would be the task of others to implement her grand vision—often with great difficulty.

“A logistical nightmare,” remembered Clint Hill. “One of the worst headaches that any office ever had to contend with,” Tish Baldridge agreed.

The dinner, held on July 11, 1961, went off without a hitch. But it required the mobilization of a virtual army to realize. Jackie’s vision for the evening required the cooperation of several organizations, “including Tish Baldridge’s staff, the office of the Military Aide to the President, the National Park Service, the State Department, the White House usher’s office, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, the Secret Service, and Rene Verdon, the White House chef,” according to Hill.

Baldridge explained:

We had to have [the Marine Band] lining the drive coming up from the pier to the house. We had to have the National Symphony Orchestra and build them a special stage. Before and after dinner we had to worry about the acoustics. We had to worry about feeding the musicians—getting them out there and feeding them; worry about portable johns, where to hide them in the bushes so it wouldn’t ruin Mt. Vernon. . . . We worried about the weather. I gave orders to my whole staff to pray. . . . We prayed for six months solidly and it worked! They
sprayed. It was a terribly buggy summer and they sprayed three times that day against bugs and mosquitos . . .

The 137 guests traveled from Washington to Mt. Vernon on the Potomac via four boats, among them a PT boat and the Kennedy family yacht, the
Honey Fitz
. After a tour of the home, the guests were treated to a Revolutionary War re-enactment. “It just so happened that the sixty or so members of the press corps were right in the line of fire,” Hill remembered. “Even though the guns were loaded with blanks, the noise and smoke were realistic, causing more than a few members of the press to jump at the sudden gunshots. When I saw the smile on [Jackie’s] face, I had little doubt that placement of the press . . . was all part of her master plan.”

The event’s unqualified success once again showed Jack how valuable Jackie could be. She spent most of the evening in conversation with the guest of honor, President Ayub Khan; the two hit it off. Both shared a passion for horses, and Jackie, with her native curiosity about life in other parts of the world, was fascinated by Khan’s stories of life in Pakistan. Khan offered an open invitation for the president and first lady to visit him in Pakistan. It was an invitation that Jackie, at least, would later accept.

John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency at the height of the Cold War, and his management of international conflicts and tensions—both his triumphs and his missteps—characterized his term in office as much as his response to the civil rights movement at home. Jacqueline Kennedy’s star power and charm often helped ease tense relations, or at least enforced a cordiality, in JFK’s relationships with many foreign leaders. Her glamour also provided good press when his approval ratings might be low. Never was Jackie on prouder display, or playing more to her advantages, than on state visits abroad. And she was abroad a lot: her official and “semi-official” trips took her to eleven countries: Canada, France, Austria, England, Greece, Venezuela, Columbia, the Vatican, India, Pakistan, and Mexico.

The importance of the Kennedys’ first official trip, to Canada in May of 1961, was heightened by its proximity to the Bay of Pigs disaster, which had happened only a month before.

It was Eisenhower who initially signed off on the CIA’s plan to train a group of 1,400 Cuban exiles for a sneak invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro. But Kennedy willingly went along with the scheme, even if, as many later claimed, he was misled by CIA and military advisers, who convinced him that the small commando unit, if able to reach the mainland, would spark a popular uprising. In truth, Castro was relatively popular with his people, and no such uprising was likely to occur. And the invasion, such as it was, was a complete and utter failure.

Early on the morning of Monday, April 17, 1961, the Cuban exile commandos landed on the south coast of Cuba. By Tuesday midnight, Jack was being informed that the operation had been botched and that the only choice now was to rescue as many exiles as possible. (The Soviets had known of the invasion for a week, it turned out. The CIA knew they knew but did not stop the invasion, nor did they inform Kennedy.) United States forces managed to rescue only 14 men; 1,189 surrendered to Castro’s forces. It was a military disaster, a diplomatic disaster, and a public relations disaster.

It also shook Jack’s confidence. “Within the privacy of his office,” Dave Powers remembered, “he made no effort to hide the distress and guilt he felt.” On April 19, Jackie told Rose that Jack “had practically been in tears. . . . She had never seen him so depressed except once at the time of his operation.” The same day, Pierre Salinger found Kennedy crying in his bedroom. Kennedy took full responsibility for the incident; his credibility, both at home and abroad, was wounded.

With the embarrassment fresh on their minds, President Kennedy and others in his administration were understandably nervous when he and Jackie made their official visit to Canada the next month. How relieved he was when they arrived in Ottawa and the streets from the airport to the governor-general’s residence were lined with cheering crowds. It didn’t matter that the crowds—chanting “Jack-ie! Jack-ie!” —were more excited to see his wife than they were to see him. It mattered that the welcome was warm.

Jackie similarly eased Jack’s passage when they visited Paris at the beginning of June. The scene along the streets was nearly identical to their Canadian reception— “Vive Jacqui! Vive Jacqui!” Jackie’s celebrity so outshone JFK’s that, taking the podium after a press luncheon, he began by famously saying, “I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself. I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris. And I have enjoyed it.” The crowd went wild.

Just as important, Jackie’s charm warmed relations between leaders. On the Paris trip, the notoriously difficult de Gaulle came away impressed with Jack’s intelligence and gravitas. This impression was no doubt helped by the way that Jackie mesmerized him with her flawless French and knowledge of French history that, according to de Gaulle, was superior to most French women’s. “Thanks in large part to Jackie Kennedy at her prettiest,”
Time
magazine reported, “Kennedy charmed the old soldier into unprecedented flattering toasts and warm gestures of friendship.”

In Vienna, immediately afterward, it could be said that Jackie salvaged the trip from utter ruin.

Jack had high hopes for Vienna, where he was to meet Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Barely six weeks removed from the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Soviet Union and the United States faced even larger tensions over the status of divided Berlin and the ever-present threat of nuclear war. Kennedy came hoping to effect a detente by building a rapport with Khrushchev. It wasn’t to be. At the talks Khrushchev hammered away at Kennedy, threatening war over the divided city, uninterested in the easing of tensions that Kennedy came to Vienna seeking. “If you want war,” Khrushchev said, “that is your problem.”

“He savaged me,” admitted a shaken JFK to a reporter for the
New York Times
. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan observed that, in meeting Khrushchev, “for the first time in his life Kennedy met a man who was impervious to his charm.” “I think [Jack] was quite depressed after that visit,” Jackie would remember. “I think he’d gone there expecting to be depressed, but I think it was so much worse than he thought.”

Khrushchev may have been immune to JFK’s charm, but he wasn’t immune to Jackie’s. Photos from the visit show him grinning like a schoolboy at Jackie, and she would remember how expertly she disarmed him
at an official dinner. “I’d just read
The Sabres of Paradise
by Lesley Blanch, which is all about the Ukraine in the 19th century . . . and [Khrushchev] said something about ‘Oh yes, the Ukraine has—now we have more teachers there per something, or more wheat.’ And I said, ‘Oh, Mr. Chairman President, don’t bore me with that…’ —and then he’d laugh.”

She also impressed Khrushchev with her knowledge of the names of the dogs in the Russian space program, and she playfully asked him to send her one of their puppies. “And by God, we were back in Washington about two months later, and two absolutely sweating, ashen-faced Russians came staggering into the Oval Room with the ambassador carrying this poor terrified puppy who’d obviously never been out of a laboratory . . .”It is an odd illustration of international relations, where a leader can threaten his enemy’s country with nuclear annihilation in one instant, and give his enemy’s wife a puppy in the next. But Jackie—with her ability to envelop a man, make him feel important, and impress without intimidating him—made such exchanges unremarkable.

Jackie would travel farther abroad without JFK, often in the company of her sister, Lee. Though Jackie and Lee’s relationship remained incredibly complex—a mixture of devotion and singular mutual understanding with great resentment, competitiveness, and jealousy—their time of greatest closeness was during Jack’s presidency. Lee lived primarily in London with her second husband, Polish Prince Stanislas “Stas” Radziwill, but the two sisters were able to spend time together, as when Jack and Jackie went to London following the Vienna summit. Together with Lee, Jackie made a triumphant “semi-official” visit to India and Pakistan in the spring of 1962.

From the moment Jackie stepped off the plane in New Delhi to a roaring crowd of three thousand, she was an object of adoration and fascination, to the populace and the leaders. Sometimes, as many as 100,000 people would line the roadways as her motorcade flew by. “Every move, every comment, every event, every outfit on her 16,000 mile voyage appeared in journalistic photographs and narratives,” wrote Barbara Perry. She enchanted Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Pakistani President Ayub Khan, already a friend from his lavish Mt. Vernon state dinner, presented Jackie with a horse, an exquisite bay gelding named
Sardar that Jackie had shipped back to the United States to ride around Glen Ora and, later, Camp David. On these and other trips, Jackie represented the United States with great poise and sophistication, burnishing not only her own image, but lending reflected glory to her husband’s administration.

10

Patrick

Early in 1963, Jackie discovered she was again pregnant. In
March the White House announced that Jackie was expecting in September and would be reducing her travels and the performance of her duties as first lady. Until June she maintained her normal stateside schedule of short weeks at the White House and Thursday through Sunday at Glen Ora, coordinating everything from the details of state dinners to the final stages of her restoration project from wherever she was. Having lost two pregnancies, Jackie and Jack both wanted to err on the side of caution. That spring, Tish Baldridge, burnt out from the pace of life in the White House, and tired from trying to spur Jackie to more public involvement, amicably resigned, taking a job at the Kennedy-owned Chicago Merchandise Mart. She was replaced by one of Jackie’s oldest friends, Nancy Tuckerman. “Tucky” and Jackie had known each other since Miss Chapin’s, and their working relationship would prove so harmonious that Tuckerman would remain her personal assistant for the next thirty-one years, until Jackie’s death.

Throughout that year, Jack kept his frenetic pace, traveling to Germany, Ireland, England, and Italy and throughout the United States. In June, Jackie stationed herself for the remainder of her pregnancy at a house they rented on Squaw Island, not far from Hyannis Port, and thereafter Jack only saw his family on weekends. Jackie continued to make plans and write memos from her Cape Cod hideaway, instructing Nancy Tuckerman on every detail of the planned state visit of the king and queen of Afghanistan on September 5. She painted and read and luxuriated in the ocean air. She prepared scrapbooks containing photos and memories
of her life with Jack, to present to him in recognition of their upcoming tenth wedding anniversary. Before they could celebrate, however, Jackie’s pregnancy would end suddenly and tragically.

On August 7, just as Jackie was returning from Caroline’s riding lesson, she began to experience intense labor pains. Five weeks premature, she was immediately taken by helicopter to nearby Otis Air Force base, where a ten-room hospital wing had been on standby for just such an emergency. The president left Washington immediately but arrived after his second son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, had already been delivered. The four-pound, one-ounce boy, delivered by Caesarean section, was baptized right away and placed in an incubator. Jackie never held Patrick, as he was considered too fragile to remove from the apparatus. He was diagnosed with hyaline membrane disease, a malformation of the lungs, and it was decided that he should be moved to Children’s Medical Center in Boston. Jack flew to Boston and kept vigil at the hospital. But the child was simply too small, too premature, the state of his lungs too grave. Despite the medical team’s best efforts, Patrick died early on the morning of August 9.

Jackie was awoken at six-thirty that morning and told the news by her doctor. “She was devastated,” remembered Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent who stood watch at her door that morning. “It was heartbreaking to see her in such emotional pain.” Jack made it back to Otis and cried at her bedside. The next day, Jackie was too ill to attend Patrick’s small funeral in Boston, officiated by Cardinal Cushing and attended by Jack, Lee Radziwill, and Jackie’s half-brother and half-sister, Jamie and Janet Auchincloss. Jack placed a St. Christopher medal in the child’s tiny coffin. On Sunday, August 11, he brought Caroline and John to see their mother, still hospitalized at Otis, “which seemed to boost Mrs. Kennedy’s spirits more than anything.” On Tuesday he returned to Washington to resume his presidential duties.

A week after the birth, Jack was with Jackie as she was released from the hospital. It was here that people close to the couple really started to notice a difference in their relationship. “With press photographers snapping away, President and Mrs. Kennedy emerged from the hospital hand in hand,” Hill remembered. “It was a small gesture, but quite significant to those of us who were around them all the time.” The couple normally
avoided physical affection in public; the death of their son had cracked something open in them.

Jackie and the children remained at the Cape for the rest of the summer, and Jack came up when he could. A devastated Jackie spent much of her time at the Squaw Island house secluded in her room. She ventured out occasionally to play with the children, but it was clear to those around her that she was suffering. Jack spent more time with the children when he was up from Washington; whether he was spurred to greater closeness by his loss or covering for a less-present Jackie is hard to tell. The two put on brave faces for the low-key celebration of their tenth anniversary at Hammersmith Farm. Jackie presented Jack with the scrapbooks she’d spent the summer making, as well as a gold St. Christopher’s medal to replace the one he’d buried with Patrick. JFK simply gave her a catalogue from a New York antiques dealer and told her to pick whatever she wanted. Those in attendance again remarked how close they seemed, how warm their relationship had become.

It was around this time that Jack decided that Jackie might benefit from some travel abroad. Lee spoke to her friend and sometimes lover, a Greek shipping magnate, about Jackie’s situation. He immediately invited both Jackie and Lee to visit him on his yacht in the Greek Isles. And so, with Kennedy’s blessing, Jackie and Lee spent two weeks relaxing aboard the
Christina
, the yacht owned by Aristotle Onassis.