What a thing to be in the Mouth of Fame.
—John Keats
“The food is marvelous, the wines are delicious, there are cigarettes on the table, people are laughing, laughing out loud, telling stories, jokes, enjoying themselves, glad to be there.” This is how the conductor Leonard Bernstein recalled the night of November 13, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline B. Kennedy hosted Luis Muñoz Marín, the governor of Puerto Rico, at an “artist party” at the White House. “When the moment comes for you to greet the President and the First Lady, two ravishing people appear in the doorway who couldn’t be more charming if they tried,” Bernstein continued. “It was like a different world, utterly like a different planet.”
He was describing one of the many extraordinary evenings the Kennedys hosted during their administration, which lasted two years and 306 days. They were a golden couple who ushered in a period of youthful, cosmopolitan vigor not seen at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue since the Franklin and Teddy Roosevelts lived there.
The “Kennedy Style” was partly a reflection of the early 1960s—a jazzy answer to the nation’s yearning for something new, polychromatic, and exciting after the gray deprivations of two world wars, the Depression, the Cold War, and Korea. But the zing of their parties was as much the result of design as it was the beneficiary of timing.
JFK was the front man: witty, rich, movie-star handsome, strategic thinking, and, at forty-three, the youngest elected president ever. Standing beside him was Jackie: a demure, elegant, quietly willful thirty-one-year-old with an unerring instinct for the drama, power, and sheer fun of entertaining at one of the greatest venues on earth. A Francophile, Mrs. Kennedy modeled her soirees on the court of Louis XIV—where the Sun King used a heady blend of politics, food, and culture to assert himself as Europe’s leading seventeenth-century monarch—and Madame de Récamier, who ran a Parisian salon where politicians mingled with artists in the early nineteenth century. Jackie conjured a sense of magic, transforming the White House into a “showcase for great American art and artists.” It was a form of seduction, and revolution, which not coincidentally burnished the family name, enabled the president’s agenda, and redefined the role of First Lady.
Fine dining was central to her vision, and the Kennedys proved to be the greatest presidential epicures since Thomas Jefferson. (FDR would have qualified, but for Mrs. Nesbitt’s gloomy fodder.) “Perhaps more than any other President and First Lady in history, John and Jacqueline Kennedy cared about food,” wrote Letitia Baldrige, Jackie’s social secretary. “They wanted to offer their guests great cuisine and tous les plaisirs de la table” (all of the pleasures of the table).
The November 1961 artists dinner began with “very good drinks” and “ashtrays everywhere just inviting you to poison yourself with cigarettes,” Bernstein recalled. As 155 guests overflowed the State Dining Room to fill the Blue and Green Rooms, the air was electric. Some of America’s leading musicians—Aaron Copland, Gian Carlo Menotti, the conductor Leopold Stokowski—mingled with government officials, diplomats, artists, industrialists, and wealthy patrons. A special, unnamed artist was scheduled to perform after dinner, and everyone buzzed with guesses about who it might be.
The Kennedys’ accomplished French cook, René Verdon—whom Jackie had anointed the first “executive chef”—had prepared an exquisite banquet: sole mousse, paired with a smooth Chardonnay; fillet of beef Montfermeil (filets mignons served with a rich sauce of carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, asparagus, zucchini, and snow peas that had simmered for an entire day to concentrate the flavors), paired with a deep Cabernet Sauvignon; a pheasant breast galantine stuffed with herbs, bacon, and a mirepoix of carrots, celery, and shallots; a green salad with beets, asparagus, and watercress; and a dessert of champagne sorbet with chocolate truffles, fruit tarts, and madeleines.
After dinner, the crowd surged into the East Room. The lights dimmed, a hush fell, and then the mysterious guest emerged into the spotlight. The crowd audibly gasped once they recognized him: Pablo Casals, the reclusive, eighty-four-year-old Spanish maestro revered as “perhaps the greatest cellist who ever lived.” He had not played at the White House since 1904, when he entertained Teddy Roosevelt. Initially, Casals had declined the Kennedys’ invitation, claiming he didn’t like to perform after eating. In truth, he resented America’s support for the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in the 1930s. But Jackie solved the impasse with a neat trick: rather than name Casals the guest of honor, the Kennedys hosted a state dinner for Governor Muñoz Marín of Puerto Rico, where Casals lived. This allowed the cellist to call his White House appearance a private rather than public recital.
Playing solo, he began with Mendelssohn’s Trio No. 1 in D Minor, op. 49, then segued into pieces by Schumann and Couperin. The audience was transfixed for a solid hour. The New York Times’s music critic hailed it as a command performance: “The moment Senor Casals drew his bow across the strings, it was with the power and authority he always has had.” Moved by the applause, Casals added a folk song from his native Catalonia, “The Song of the Birds,” as a tip of the hat to his hosts. It was, said Mrs. Kennedy, “an unbelievable dream.”
Bernstein was nearly overcome: “I’ve never seen so many happy artists in my life. It was a joy to watch it. And the feeling of hospitality, of warmth, of welcome, the taste with which everything was done. The goodness of everything; it was just good.”
Much had changed since Bernstein was last in that room, a year earlier. In April 1960, he and his orchestra performed at a lugubrious state dinner hosted by the Eisenhowers for the president of Colombia. There were no cigarettes, cocktails, or bonhomie that night. “The food was bad, and the wine was bad,” Bernstein recalled. The atmosphere “was very stiff….Dinner was at a huge horseshoe shaped table at which seventy-five people or so were seated so that nobody could ever really talk to anybody….By the time I got to play I was a wreck. And by the time I finished playing I was more of a wreck.”
The day after the Kennedy party, Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, were packing to return to New York, when they received “a very secret little message” asking if they would be available for an intimate dinner at the White House. The conductor had pressing obligations and hardly knew JFK. But this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Changing plans, the Bernsteins joined the Kennedys and the Bradens—Joan was a close friend of Jackie’s, and Tom was a former CIA agent and the author of Eight Is Enough, which spawned the TV series—for dinner in the small dining room on the mansion’s second floor.
“You dine on Abraham Lincoln’s china with Madison’s spoons,” Bernstein marveled. “The furniture is very beautiful. Everything in it is presidential and old.”
Later, the group retired to the Oval Room (the president’s drawing room, not the office), where JFK presided from his rocking chair, smoking cigars and chatting “in great high spirits,” Bernstein said. “It became the sort of place that you were most happy to be in the world.” The couples laughed and traded gossip and jokes, as if time stretched to infinity. “It was all so familiar and familial,” Bernstein recalled. “I couldn’t tell you one thing we talked about the whole night; it was just so delicious.”
While it was an exceptional evening for the Bernsteins, such moments were a regular feature of the Kennedy years. They were a welcome diversion from race riots and Cold War missiles, and, as Jackie saw it, serving good food in a congenial setting was simply good politics. “The French know this,” she said in a lilting voice, which camouflaged her incisive intelligence. “If you put busy men in an attractive atmosphere where the surroundings are comfortable, the food is good, you relax, you unwind, there’s some stimulating conversation….[It’s] part of the art of living in Washington.”
As the clock reached 1:00 a.m., Bernstein grew anxious for the president, who usually left social gatherings by 10:00. “Don’t worry about it,” Jackie said, shrugging. “If he wants to stay up, let him stay up. He hasn’t done this in ages.”
When Bernstein gave this account to the journalist Nelson Aldrich Jr. as part of an oral history, he savored those intimate hours in the Kennedys’ inner sanctum even more than the remarkable dinner with Casals. “It was really divine, and I suppose the quality about it that made it so specially touching was the suddenness, the unexpectedness, the improvised quality of the evening. We were so delighted to have been picked…to stay on and have dinner privately. It was really like…being touched by a hand from beyond, chosen for that wonderful moment.”
Two years later, almost to the day, JFK was assassinated in Dallas. In an instant, the bright radiance of the Kennedy Style was reduced to the subdued, elegiac flicker of the “eternal flame” at his grave site in Arlington National Cemetery.
Speaking to the political historian Theodore H. White, Jackie said she was “ashamed” that she was unable to pinpoint a grand historical allusion to her husband’s presidency. Instead, she found herself “obsessed” with a song from the Broadway musical Camelot, written by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner, a college friend of Jack’s. Before going to sleep, she said, Kennedy would often listen to the cast album. His favorite lines came at the end of the record:
Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.
White published a tribute in Life, “For President Kennedy: An Epilogue,” that established Camelot as a metaphor that has defined JFK’s presidency ever since.
“We never really knew how different life was then until it was over,” Bernstein mused. “The murder in Dallas was…the worst experience of my life….For thinking people and working artists, I had the feeling that at that moment everybody became aware of how excited and happy they had been….I don’t think…we all realized to what an extent America had a new image and a new promise for the artist until he was killed. Then it dawned on us like a very bleak dawn. And I must say it’s never been the same since….I can’t get over it. I don’t think anybody can.”
One night in May 1951, the journalist Charles Bartlett and his wife, Martha, invited their friend Jack Kennedy, a six-foot tall, 150 pound, thirty-three-year-old bachelor congressman from Massachusetts, to dinner. It was a small party for eight guests at their brick row house in Georgetown. As they progressed from cocktails to chicken casserole to a game of charades, Jack was intrigued by a dark-haired, sloe-eyed twenty-one-year-old named Jacqueline Bouvier. “Jackie,” as her friends called her, was raised in Manhattan, Long Island, and Virginia. The daughter of a socialite mother and the dissolute Wall Street banker “Black Jack” Bouvier, Jackie was Debutante of the Year in 1947 and schooled at Miss Porter’s, Vassar, in Paris, and at George Washington University, where she earned a degree in French literature. In 1951, she was working as an inquiring photographer for the Washington Times Herald, when the Bartletts invited her to dinner.
Like Jack, Jackie was raised Catholic and had a mischievous sense of humor. He was smitten. “I’ve never met anyone like her,” he told a friend. The feeling was mutual. In September 1953, the Kennedys were married in Newport, Rhode Island. A reception for twelve hundred was held at Hammersmith Farm, the estate of Jackie’s stepfather, Hugh D. Auchincloss. News of the wedding hit the front page of The New York Times.
What the newlyweds didn’t know was that the Bartlett dinner was a setup engineered by Jack’s father, Joseph “Joe” Kennedy, to put Jacqueline Bouvier in his son’s line of sight. It was a “honey trap,” as spies say. A Midas-like businessman and ambassador to England, Joe Kennedy had a tentacular reach and big plans for his second-born son. (His oldest, Joseph Jr., had been killed in World War II.) He felt it was time for Jack to grow up, get married, and kick his political career into high gear. As usual, Joe Kennedy got his way.
After defeating Richard M. Nixon by just 112,803 votes, the narrowest margin in the twentieth century, John F. Kennedy was sworn in on January 20, 1961. At home, racial strife was spilling into street violence. In Europe, the Cold War deepened as the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, built the Berlin Wall.
The day before JFK’s inauguration a nor’easter ripped through Washington, dropped the temperature to twenty degrees, and buried the city in eight inches of snow. But the National Guard, the sanitation department, and seventeen hundred Boy Scouts shoveled the streets clear, and the celebrations that night sizzled. Frank Sinatra headlined a preinaugural ball—featuring the comic Milton Berle, actors Sidney Poitier and Ethel Merman and Laurence Olivier, the musicians Harry Belafonte and Ella Fitzgerald, and Gene Kelly doing an Irish jig—which raised some $2 million dollars to retire Kennedy’s campaign costs. They rocked until 1:30 in the morning, when Jackie went to bed and Jack slipped off to a second ball, hosted by his father. Kennedy didn’t sleep until 3:30. Nevertheless, he was red-cheeked and energetic at his inauguration the next day.
John F. Kennedy was the first chief executive born in the twentieth century, and when he replaced the seventy-year-old Eisenhower—the oldest president in history at that point—the symbolism was clear: JFK was the embodiment of a new era. He gave one of the shortest (thirteen minutes) and most eloquent inauguration speeches ever. Emphasizing the need for collective sacrifice and action, he intoned in his distinctive Brahmin brogue: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
Late that night, still high on adrenaline, Kennedy arrived at the home of the journalist Joseph Alsop, who offered him a glass of champagne and a bowl of terrapin soup. JFK “took the wine but needed no more than a glance to reject what had formerly been the greatest delicacy of the United States,” Alsop recalled. “It hardly mattered. I soon observed that what he really wanted was one last cup of unadulterated admiration, and the people crowded around gave him that cup freely, filled to the brim.”
Wasting no time, the Kennedys hosted their first official party on January 29, a dinner for cabinet members, congressmen, appointees, fundraisers, and a few journalists. When the social secretary, Letitia Baldrige—who had been a friend of Jackie’s at Miss Porter’s, a girl’s boarding school in Connecticut—asked what kind of beverages to serve, the Usher’s Office informed her that the Eisenhowers served one bowl of fruit punch and one bowl of mildly spiked punch at their parties. If this was a warning from the Old Guard, the tyros ignored it.
Though he was not a big drinker, President Kennedy told the social secretary, “I want a good party.” With that, Baldrige ordered plenty of “quality liquor,” circulated waiters with trays of mixed drinks, and had the Marine Band play Cole Porter tunes. “The party was a smash,” she noted with satisfaction. But when the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union heard that booze was served, protests erupted across the country. “Liquor in the White House!” gasped headlines.
Kennedy was furious. “What did you do to me?” he thundered. “Isn’t this job difficult enough without you alienating an entire section of America?” Baldrige felt she’d had her “timbers shivered.” The Kennedys reverted to an Eisenhowerian drinks program for a while, and when they quietly resumed serving cocktails, no one noticed. A year and many parties later, JFK thanked Baldrige for the smashing cabinet party, saying it was “the greatest thing that’s ever been done for White House entertaining.”
The First Lady, meanwhile, had set an ambitious goal: to make the Executive Mansion a magnet for the most interesting and powerful people in the world. To do so, she would need to overhaul the building’s decor and reconceive it as a backdrop—a stage set, really—for a new kind of presidential entertaining. It helped that she had an eye, connections, and money.
Guided by a vision of the White House as a showcase for the best of American culture and the locus of global power, Mrs. Kennedy used a palette of bold primary colors—yellow, red, blue—to update the rooms, decorated them with fine nineteenth-century antiques, and hung them with museum-quality paintings. She created the new position of White House curator, hired leading architects and designers, established a private fundraising group to solicit art, antiques, and donations from the public, and courted the media. “Everything in the White House must have a reason for being there. It would be sacrilege to ‘redecorate’ it—a word I hate,” Jackie said. “It must be restored…that is a question of scholarship.”
Though she could be shy, Jackie made sure her work was publicized. In February 1962, she led a television crew on a tour through the refurbished People’s House. The resulting TV documentary (which aired on CBS and NBC, and later on ABC) garnered eighty million viewers, earned Jackie an honorary Emmy Award, and made her beloved by the American public. She had put the Kennedy White House on the pop-cultural-political map in a new way.
To brighten the lugubrious State Dining Room, the First Lady had the dark green walls repainted in two tones of white, to highlight its craftsmanship. She replaced Mamie Eisenhower’s large U- or E-shaped tables with small round tables, which nearly doubled the number of guests while making conversation more intimate. To speed things up, reduce food waste, and leave more time for mingling and entertainment after state dinners, she reduced the traditional five-course meals to four courses (fish or soup, entrée, salad and cheese, dessert). And she swapped the large urns of flowers that had once blocked views with smaller, more natural flower arrangements inspired by Flemish still lifes, “the opposite of what you’d find in a funeral home,” she slyly noted.
To complete her vision, Mrs. Kennedy went in search of a chef worthy of the President’s House. Her first choice was Bui Van Han, the Tonkinese chef at the French embassy in London. Said to be one of the world’s greatest, if least known, gastronomes, Bui produced refined fare such as côtelettes de pigeon à l’espagnole and paupiette de sole à la Richelieu. Much to the relief of the French ambassador, Bui declined the offer.
Undaunted, Mrs. Kennedy consulted her father-in-law, who knew his way around America’s finest restaurants. One of his favorites was La Caravelle, a temple of haute cuisine in New York. Named after the tri-masted vessels Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World, the restaurant was in the Shoreham Hotel on West Fifty-Fifth Street. There, the chef Roger Fessaguet, who had worked at Le Pavillon, Manhattan’s original French restaurant, used roast duck and pike quenelles to lure such luminaries as Salvador Dalí, Walter Cronkite, and Marlene Dietrich. JFK’s favorite dishes there were the vichyssoise (a cold creamy leek and potato soup) and the chicken in champagne sauce, which he’d order to take out and reheat on the family plane as he campaigned across the country.
As legend has it, Fessaguet suggested she hire one of his kitchen lieutenants. But according to someone who was there, this narrative is only partly correct. “I worked at Le Pavillon and Fessaguet recommended me to the Kennedys,” Jacques Pépin, the cookbook author and TV chef, told me. Before moving to the States, Pépin worked as the personal chef for President Charles de Gaulle at the Élysée Palace. “But in France the president’s chef is not treated as anything special,” he said, laughing. “He’s at the bottom of the social scale. It’s a lot of hard work and no recognition.”
Pépin was honored by the Kennedys’ offer, but he and the chef Pierre Franey had already been hired by Howard Johnson Sr., founder of the eponymous chain of roadside eateries. “I liked John Kennedy,” Pépin said, “but I didn’t want to move to Washington. And I didn’t realize at all the potential of the job.” He declined Mrs. Kennedy’s offer, with “no regrets,” and recommended his roommate, a chef at the Essex House hotel named René Verdon.
Solidly built, with a round face, a rim of dark hair under a white toque, cheerful eyes, and a gap-toothed smile, Verdon was a French chef from central casting. He agreed to join the Kennedys and spent two weeks at La Caravelle learning their favorite dishes. On April 5, 1961, Verdon served a lunch for the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, and sixteen guests at the White House. The menu included trout in Chablis and sauce Vincent; beef au jus; artichoke bottoms Beaucaire; and a dessert of meringue shells filled with chocolate and raspberries that he called désir d’Avril (April Desire). The meal was a hit.
“There’s nothing like French cooking to promote good Anglo-American relations,” Craig Claiborne wrote in The New York Times. Verdon was hired at a salary of $10,000 a year plus room and board. It marked a turning point in American food history, the dawn of a gilded age of White House cookery.
Verdon was hardworking, detail oriented, and even-tempered. He used seasonal food, grew vegetables on the roof, planted herbs in the East Garden, and hired the skilled pastry chef Ferdinand Louvat. “I cooked everything fresh,” Verdon said. “If the ingredients are superb, then the cooking can be, and must be, simple.” This was the kind of White House food Mrs. Kennedy had dreamed of, and soon la Maison Blanche gained a reputation for serving some of the finest meals in town, or anywhere.
Jackie Kennedy was in sync with a subtle shift in the zeitgeist. Just as she hired Verdon, Americans were beginning to spend more time and money at restaurants, travel abroad, buy cookware, and try new recipes at home. TV stations across the country aired cooking shows—from a housewife demonstrating “how to make average food appetizing” in Kentucky to the British restaurateur Dione Lucas demonstrating French technique in New York.
In October 1961, Alfred A. Knopf published Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child and her French friends Simone “Simca” Beck and Louisette Bertholle. The cookbook sold well, and by 1963 Mrs. Child was hosting The French Chef on WGBH, Boston’s public television station. At a time when Big Food hawked time-saving meals in a can, Jell-O salads, and Sanka to “harried housewives” who allegedly did not like to cook, Julia’s message was counterintuitive: “Nothing is too much trouble if it turns out the way it should. Good results require that one take time and care.” She struck a nerve. “Julia,” as everyone called her, was the first celebrity TV cook to break into the mainstream. She appeared on the cover of Time in 1966, won her first Emmy that same year, and helped launch the American Food Revolution.
Julia beamed into people’s kitchens to demystify recipes and to explain what shallots were and how to sharpen a knife, drink wine, eat cheese, “cook fearlessly,” and, above all, “have fun!” This was as much a life philosophy as it was an approach to cooking, and the message empowered millions, particularly women. Looking back, Julia noted, “I was lucky the Kennedys were in the White House and Jackie hired French chef René Verdon. Suddenly everyone was interested in French cuisine.”
One of Verdon’s sous-chefs was a man named Julius Spessot. A native of Istria, Italy, Spessot “had an eighth-grade education. No money, no nothing,” his widow, Luisa, told me. But he could cook. Spessot had learned to carve elaborate ice sculptures on an Italian ocean liner, and in 1954 he jumped ship in New York and eventually landed at the Essex House, where he worked for René Verdon. When the Kennedys hired Verdon in 1961, he brought Spessot along.
Spessot assisted Verdon at large banquets and cooked in the Kennedys’ private quarters, delighting JFK with his pasta with lobster sauce. “Julius, you made my day!” Kennedy said, beaming. The president was equally enamored of his rich zuppa inglese, or “English soup,” a dessert inspired by trifle: layers of sponge cake and custard topped with fruit and whipped cream. “Don’t you dare make that again,” Jackie warned, “he liked it too much. People don’t want a pig as president.”
Yet the glamorous job at the White House was a hardship. Spessot earned $5,700 in 1961 and $8,100 in 1962—paid by checks, Luisa said, that were issued by Joe Kennedy, whose $1 billion fortune underwrote JFK’s $10 million trust fund (about $60 million today). While JFK used his $50,000 government expense account for official entertaining, and donated his $100,000 salary to charity, he paid for private entertaining out of his (or his father’s) pocket. The Spessots were not so lucky.
“I tried to save, but we were poor and living in a tiny apartment in Virginia,” Luisa recalled. One compensation was the fruits, vegetables, and meat that purveyors gifted Julius. “He’d come home with all these bags of food, and sometimes cash,” Luisa said, laughing. “It wasn’t much, maybe $50 a week, but it was a big help.” The pastry chef Ferdinand Louvat gave Spessot “bags of goodies”—leftover cakes, cookies, and ice cream, Luisa said. The White House was a good experience, she added. “If they had paid more, we would have stayed. But we couldn’t do it.” Julius quit in 1963 and built an airline catering company in New York. He died in 2003, and his three children became middle-class professionals. His was a classic immigrant tale, and in that the Spessots had more in common with the Kennedys than they realized.
It was food—a lack of food—that uprooted both of JFK’s great-grandfathers from Ireland and sent them to the New World in search of something to eat. After the potato famine of 1840, Thomas Fitzgerald, from County Limerick, and Patrick Kennedy, of County Wexford, landed in Boston. They flourished in business and politics and were fierce rivals. In a courtship worthy of Romeo and Juliet, their grandchildren Rose Fitzgerald and Joe Kennedy married against their wishes.
Rose and Joe raised their nine children in Bronxville, New York, and in Brookline and Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and fed them hearty New England standards: cod, chowder, baked beans, corn muffins, hot dogs, ice cream. Jack was handsome, athletic, slim, beset by a bad back, and not especially interested in food. His “tastes are distressingly normal—plain food—children’s food—good food,” Jackie wrote. “He likes anything.”
For breakfast JFK stuck to a routine of orange juice, boiled or poached eggs, bacon, toast with marmalade, and coffee with milk. At lunch he was known as a “soup, sandwich and fruit” man. At dinner he favored lamb chops, steak, chicken, or turkey and mashed potatoes. Joe Kennedy sometimes flew fresh crabmeat from Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami to the White House aboard his plane. For dessert Jack liked chocolate, or the exotically flavored ice creams from Louis Sherry, on whose board Joe sat.
President Kennedy’s favorite meal was a bowl of Boston clam chowder. In his recipe, René Verdon used two pounds of littleneck clams, potatoes, butter, milk, salt pork, onions, and whipping cream. It made a rich and delicious brew. At a meeting with the Canadian prime minister, Lester B. Pearson, JFK served bowls of the chowder for lunch. Pearson enjoyed it so much he asked for the recipe. On the second day, the two again ordered chowder. And when they ordered it again on the third day, Verdon was amazed. “I would like to think [the chowder] played a small part in enhancing U.S./Canada relations,” Baldrige wrote.
Jackie Kennedy “was no less attentive [to family meals] than for a state dinner,” Verdon noted. “She preferred simple meals prepared with the freshest seasonal ingredients.” She took her breakfast—orange juice, toast with honey, and coffee with skim milk—on a tray in bed, where she would read the paper and play with her children, Caroline and John. Her lunch was a cup of broth and a slim sandwich, though she sometimes indulged in a grilled cheese. Her favorite dinner was cold poached salmon, followed by lamb with potatoes, string beans, and ice cream.
Jackie kept her weight at exactly 120 pounds. Like many women of her era, she smoked cigarettes, usually filtered L&Ms, which curbed her appetite. If she gained two extra pounds, she would fast for a day, increase her exercise time, and resort to a fruit-only diet.
Kennedy was attuned to the optics of his presidency. He nixed Verdon’s use of French on his menus and highlighted popular California wines from Inglenook, Almaden, and Wente Brothers at public functions. But at private dinners he poured distinguished first-growth Bordeaux from France, including Château Margaux or Château Haut-Brion.
To entertain is to give of oneself. It’s a kindness.
—Letitia Baldrige, In the Kennedy Style
Jacqueline Kennedy felt at home in France. Her father’s family, the Bouviers, originated in Provence (the family name translates as “cowherds,” betraying humble roots). She studied in Paris during college and spoke the language beautifully. As a girl, she had strolled down the long, refractive Hall of Mirrors in the Versailles Palace and wondered what it would have been like in the court of the Sun King. She came close to finding out.
June 1, 1961, was the last day of a quick diplomatic visit to France. President Kennedy was there to persuade President Charles de Gaulle not to develop nuclear weapons and to rely on the United States against the Soviets. It did not go well. De Gaulle was leery of American meddling and determined to restore French pride after the losses of World War II, the Suez crisis, and Indochina (Vietnam). But even the “irritating…vain…impossible to please” de Gaulle (as JFK’s advisers called him) was not immune to the charms of the American First Lady.
Jacqueline Kennedy embodied what is now called soft power, the eye-dazzling, emotionally connective aspect of American culture associated with Hollywood, rock ’n’ roll, bold visual arts, theater, and literature (if not yet food and wine). It is a form of seductive propaganda that can be as persuasive as military “hard power.” De Gaulle was awed by her knowledge of French history, and his public was thrilled by her chic ensembles, especially her pillbox hats. Kennedy deadpanned, “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.”
On their last night, the Kennedys were feted in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, which had been transformed into an eighteenth-century performance space. A long rectangular table draped in white lace was illuminated by tall white tapers that were reflected by the mirrors, gleaming silver, and sparkling crystal. Waiters materialized from behind painted screens that hid ovens, coolers, and staging tables. The sublime six-course dinner was paired with three beautiful wines and a champagne. Afterward, musicians dressed in period costume led the group by candlelight down a darkened hallway to a jewel-like theater, where, on a stage lit by torches, dancers performed a ballet originally commissioned by Louis XV.
The evening “was magic,” recalled Letitia Baldrige. “The whole thing was a logistical miracle, carried off with…style and panache.” Jackie agreed. Back in Washington, she wondered if she could conjure a similarly magical night.
It so happened that General Ayub Khan, the president of Pakistan, was scheduled for a state dinner on July 11. Pakistan was an important ally, but relations with America had grown frosty. And JFK, still smarting from the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April, needed a diplomatic win.
Jackie knew just the spot for her coup de théâtre: Mount Vernon, George Washington’s Virginia plantation. It was appropriate, she said, because Khan was a former general who would appreciate the historical allusion to Washington. The fact that a state dinner had never been held outside the White House didn’t bother her. Nor did it matter that Mount Vernon was remote, had last hosted an official function in 1926, and had minimal electricity, kitchen facilities, and restrooms. And when the Pakistanis worried that it would be seen as a snub that their dinner was not being held at the White House, the State Department scrambled to convince them that Mount Vernon was a special site that would generate even more favorable press.
The dinner was just a month away, which left barely enough time to design a menu, curate the guest list, send invitations, arrange entertainment, and take care of all the details of such an ambitious undertaking. While her staff worried about the “insurmountable” problems, Jackie saw “possibilities.” She had “a total mastery of detail—endless, endless detail,” the chief usher, J. B. West, said.
To accommodate 132 guests, a large blue-and-yellow tent was erected on the lawn, and chairs, tables, linens, and staff were trucked to the property. Jackie wanted Verdon to pay homage to Martha Washington’s food, but his dishes had to be cooked at the White House, transported to Mount Vernon, and reheated. Further, Khan was Muslim and did not consume pork or alcohol.
The chef welcomed the challenge. But as the minutes ticked down to party time, the mood tightened. Portable toilets set in a thicket of poison ivy were moved, as were hulking army trucks that blocked the tent. Mosquitoes held “their own state dinner” on the sweaty workmen, Baldrige wrote, and were sprayed with insecticide. But when a breeze wafted the poisonous gas toward Verdon’s food, he threatened to quit and return to France. The staff teetered on the edge of nervous collapse.
At such moments, Mrs. Kennedy smiled and in “a quiet little phrase of iron,” Baldrige recalled, insisted, “Of course it can be done.”
Then the flotilla arrived. President Kennedy had captained the patrol-torpedo boat PT-109 during World War II and suggested transporting guests to Mount Vernon by water. Two presidential yachts, a navy yacht, and a PT boat (equipped with sweaters and headscarves, to keep bodies warm and hairdos in place) sailed from Washington down the Potomac to George Washington’s pier. It added to the magic of the evening.
While General Khan and his daughter, Begum Nasim Akhtar Aurangzeb, drank nonalcoholic orange drinks, the Americans sipped bourbon mint juleps from silver cups, as Washington had done. An army unit dressed in Continental army uniforms reenacted a 1776 military drill with fife, drums, and the firing of muskets. Just before the eight o’clock dinner, Kennedy walked Khan through the garden, alone, to discuss two top secret operations. The CIA had been flying U-2 spy planes from Pakistan over China to monitor its nuclear weapons program; the agency was also parachuting trained insurgents and weapons into Tibet. But when Kennedy gave India, Pakistan’s blood enemy, $1 billion in aid, Khan was furious and suspended the Tibetan airdrops. That night at Mount Vernon, JFK’s charm and Jackie’s spectacular mise-en-scène convinced Khan to resume the Tibetan flights. (The CIA’s operations helped spur China’s invasion of India in 1962, and the geopolitical chess match in Asia that continues today.)
The Kennedy men wore tuxedos, General Khan wore a white dinner jacket with black tuxedo pants, and his daughter wore a white satin sari. Jackie dressed in a sleeveless gown of white organza and lace with a chartreuse silk sash, designed by Oleg Cassini. “As they walked with their escorts across the lawn from the veranda, the women looked from a distance like pale butterflies. A light breeze fluttered the pastel organza, chiffon, and lace of their dresses,” Baldrige wrote. “Candlelight flashed off diamond earrings and necklaces, and glimmered on the crystal goblets and vermeil flatware. Even a group of fireflies appeared to add their special glow.”
Under the tent, Verdon’s dinner included crabmeat and avocado mimosa, followed by poulet chasseur (chicken breasts in a tomato mushroom sauce) and couronne de riz Clamart (rice baked with vegetables and Parmesan cheese); dessert was framboises à la crème chantilly (raspberries topped with sugar and whipped cream) and petits fours secs (palmier cookies dipped in melted chocolate). Raising a flute of Moët & Chandon Impérial Brut champagne, Kennedy toasted Khan as the George Washington of Pakistan. After dinner, the group followed a path lit by pungent citronella (anti-mosquito) candles to a forest grove. There, musicians from the National Symphony Orchestra played Morton Gould, Mozart, Debussy, and Gershwin.
It was a flawless, unprecedented, and so far unrepeated evening.
“Jackie wanted to do Versailles in America,” said Oleg Cassini. “No one suspected then, not even the president, that…there was nobody to touch Jackie using style as a political tool.”
The Kennedys’ most celebrated White House party was held on April 29, 1962, which Letitia Baldrige referred to as the “Brains Dinner.” Hearing this, Verdon was horrified. “Non, non, Mademoiselle, we are not serving brains for dinner!” he objected. The social secretary laughed and assured the chef that the Kennedys had invited “brains” and were not planning to eat them.
The brains in question were forty-nine Nobel Prize winners—an extraordinary group that included Robert Frost, Linus Pauling, Pearl Buck, Katherine Anne Porter, John Dos Passos, J. Robert Oppenheimer, James Baldwin, and John Glenn. Hardly the frazzled academics the staff had imagined, the brains proved to be a sophisticated, thirsty, high-spirited group.
As the Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief,” the Kennedys descended the Grand Staircase to the Entrance Hall. Tan from a Palm Beach vacation, “Jack and Jackie actually shimmered,” observed the novelist William Styron. “You would have had to be abnormal, perhaps psychotic, to be immune to their dumbfounding appeal….[A] number of the guests…appeared so affected by the glamour that their eyes took on a goofy, catatonic gaze.”
Verdon created a seafood mousse appetizer decorated with morel mushrooms and lobster that he called La Couronne de l’Élu Victoria (Crowns of Victory), to honor the laureates. That was followed by beef Wellington (beef tenderloin encased in puff pastry and named after the Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo), served with duxelles (shallots, mushrooms, and foie gras) and a rich Madeira sauce; pommes de terre chipp (handmade potato chips); fonds d’artichauts favorite (artichokes in a cream sauce with truffles); and a dessert of bombe caribienne (Tahitian vanilla ice cream mixed with pineapple, rum, coconut milk, and cinnamon).
Then an air force band strummed lively tunes and herded the guests toward the East Room for the night’s entertainment. But the chemist Linus Pauling started to waltz across the floor, and soon all the brains were whirling around. When they were finally seated, the actor Fredric March read from an unpublished novel by Ernest Hemingway, whose widow, Mary Hemingway, was in the room. Then he read a speech by General George C. Marshall, who had won a Nobel for the Marshall Plan; his widow was also there. With impeccable timing, JFK quipped, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” The laureates roared, and Kennedy’s words passed into legend.
Two weeks later, the Kennedys’ trip to Paris paid spectacular dividends in Washington when the First Lady orchestrated a dinner in honor of André Malraux, the French minister of cultural affairs and her “intellectual crush.” As he toured her through the Impressionist paintings in Paris, they shared a naughty sense of humor. “What did you do before you married Jack Kennedy?” Malraux asked. “J’ai été pucelle” (I was a little virgin), she replied.
The guest list for the Malraux party included painters like Franz Kline and Mark Rothko; writers like Saul Bellow and Tennessee Williams; the film director Elia Kazan, the actress Julie Harris, and the choreographer George Balanchine. But the star was Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly transatlantic solo from New York to Paris aboard the Spirit of St. Louis, in 1927. After the murder of their son and criticism of his pro-Fascist views, Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, had retreated into seclusion. But JFK wondered, “Where are the…really great Americans, like Charles Lindbergh?” When the pilot was traced to an unlisted phone number, he was gratified by the invitation. And when he appeared at the White House, guests wept at seeing their childhood hero in the flesh.
At dinner, Malraux whispered to Jackie that he had persuaded France to lend the Mona Lisa to the United States. Leonardo’s masterpiece had not left the Louvre in four hundred years and was priceless, but de Gaulle recognized the controversial loan as a chance to mend fences with America, and the deal was done.
It was almost undone when Soviet nuclear missiles were discovered in Cuba. After a tense standoff, a détente was secretly brokered over meals in Washington: the terms were proposed at a lunch of escargots at the Occidental restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue; agreed to with cups of black coffee at the Statler Coffee Shop; and finalized over a Chinese dinner at the back of the Yenching Palace on Connecticut Avenue. As a result, Khrushchev agreed to remove his missiles from Cuba and Kennedy withdrew U.S. missiles from Turkey.
With nuclear Armageddon averted, the Mona Lisa was unveiled at the National Gallery on January 8, 1963. “Mona Mania” drew more than a million visitors and delivered a publicity bonanza for the White House.
The event heralded a golden interlude, observed the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., during which the nation was inspired by the First Lady to become a better version of itself. “The things people had once held against her—the unconventional beauty, the un-American elegance, the taste for French clothes and French food—were suddenly no longer liabilities but assets,” he wrote. Jackie “represented…a suggestion that America was not to be trapped forever in the bourgeois ideal,” but could reach for “a dream of civilization and beauty.”
Jacqueline Kennedy rarely discussed her marriage in public, but she was perceptive about its benefits and traps. In a 1953 letter to her confidant, the Catholic priest Father Joseph Leonard, she wrote, “Maybe I’m just dazzled and picture myself in a glittering world of crowned heads and Men of Destiny—and not just a sad little housewife….That world can be very glamorous from the outside—but if you’re in it—and you’re lonely—it could be a Hell.”
Though she is considered America’s most elegant, sphinxlike First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy was at heart a bookish introvert. She enjoyed the White House, but occasionally shirked her duties to spend time reading, riding horses, playing tennis, traveling, or shopping. (Her mother-in-law, Rose Kennedy, or Second Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, would substitute as JFK’s hostess.) The real sphinx in the marriage was JFK.
Charles Bartlett, who introduced the Kennedys, was struck by the way Jack used his great charm to pull people into his orbit, only to keep them at a distance, revealing just parts of himself. “No one ever knew John Kennedy,” Bartlett said, “not all of him.” Jackie knew him best, and she was painfully aware of his infidelities.
His liaisons spanned the gamut from the nineteen-year-old White House intern Mimi Beardsley to married friends like Mary Pinchot Meyer, gauzy celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, and shadier sirens like Judith Campbell Exner, the mistress of the mafia boss Sam Giancana. Jack was “like my father in a way—loves the chase and is bored with the conquest—and once married needs proof he’s still attractive, so flirts with other women and resents you,” Jackie confided. “I saw how that nearly killed Mummy.”
JFK liked to celebrate his birthday with splash-out parties—most famously in 1962, when he turned forty-five and Marilyn Monroe suggestively purred, “Happy biiiirthday, Mis-terr Pres-i-dennt,” at a fundraiser in Madison Square Garden. There was no subtext: her sex appeal was on full display, as was his.
A year later, on May 29, 1963, Jackie arranged for a birthday dinner cruise aboard the presidential yacht Sequoia. A couple dozen friends and family members—including Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, Sargent and Eunice Shriver, the English actor David Niven, the Rat Packer Peter Lawford and his wife, Patricia Kennedy, and the Bradlees—were aboard. It had been a rough week: Kennedy had threatened to send troops to integrate the University of Alabama, angering the right; then he refused to withdraw from Vietnam, angering the left. He needed to unwind.
At eight o’clock the Sequoia cruised down the Potomac. After cocktails on the fantail, dinner was served in the saloon—crabmeat ravigote, noodle casserole, asparagus hollandaise, roast fillet of beef, and a dessert called bombe président sauce chocolat, washed down with bottles of 1955 Dom Pérignon. A three-piece band played for guests in “festive yachting clothes,” who roasted JFK with gifts, such as a pair of boxing gloves for battling Congress.
The night turned sultry, with thunder, lightning, and rain, and soon everyone was soaked. While he was horsing around, Ted Kennedy’s pant leg was ripped off, leaving him with “white underpants on the port side flashing,” Niven reported. The band picked up the tempo, and soon “they were doing the twist, the cha-cha, and everything in between,” recalled the Secret Service agent Clint Hill. “It was wild. I don’t think I had ever seen the president and Mrs. Kennedy having more fun. Nobody wanted the night to end.” Despite the presence of his wife and one of his mistresses (Mary Meyer), Kennedy pursued Tony Bradlee, wife of his friend Ben Bradlee, of Newsweek and the future editor of The Washington Post. “It was a pretty strenuous attack…his hands wandered,” Tony recalled. She felt “kind of flattered, but appalled, too.” The next day, the Kennedys and Bradlees helicoptered to Camp David for an afternoon of golf and swimming. They pretended nothing had happened, and life went on.
But something had changed. That summer of 1963 the Kennedys’ marriage seemed to reach an equilibrium. Jackie found their union was “never more intense and more complete,” Schlesinger wrote. “It turned out to be the time of the greatest happiness.”
She was pregnant with a boy, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. But he was born prematurely, and when he died, Jack wept and draped himself over the small coffin. Overcome, Jackie fled to Greece to join her sister Lee aboard Aristotle Onassis’s yacht. After a two-week retreat, she returned Stateside, to the tumultuous summer of 1963. Americans were demanding tax cuts. The Vietnam War was escalating. And on August 28, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Just before Thanksgiving, the Kennedys boarded Air Force One for a campaign swing through Texas. On November 22, JFK had his usual breakfast—two boiled eggs, toast with marmalade, orange juice, coffee—and gave a speech in Fort Worth. Then he and Jackie flew to Dallas, where they climbed aboard a Lincoln convertible with Governor and Mrs. John Connally. At 12:30 the motorcade drove slowly toward a rally, surrounded by cheering crowds. Nellie Connally beamed and said, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”
“No, you certainly can’t,” Kennedy replied.
As the limousine came abreast of the Texas School Book Depository, Jackie, dressed in a pink coat and matching pillbox hat, and Jack, dressed in a gray suit, smiled brightly and waved.