Mona Lisa in Camelot

Minister Malraux may have promised Jacqueline Kennedy that he would send her the Mona Lisa, but it was unlikely that French officials would sanction the exhibition. As one historian later observed, “It did not seem appropriate to send one of the most treasured symbols of European culture to America, then regarded as a country with hardly any culture at all.”

Deep tensions between both nations had resurfaced when de Gaulle returned to power in 1958. The imperious Frenchman had exasperated Allied officials during World War II with his grand-standing as leader of the French Resistance movement and unconcealed mistrust of his allies. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt considered de Gaulle unreliable, banning him from planning for the Normandy invasion and declining to invite him to the important Yalta Conference of Allied leaders in 1945.

The rift between de Gaulle and Roosevelt was kept mostly under wraps in pursuit of unity, but leaders could be more blunt in private. After only one month as president, an exasperated Harry Truman described de Gaulle as an “SOB.” De Gaulle’s style played better at home, where his snappish disregard for the interests of the powerful United States and its fixation on fighting communism around the world were well received by many of his countrymen. His was a nationalist message, and he took advantage of France’s status in the Western alliance to torment and bully his ostensible ally.

What appeared to many of his overseas allies as bad manners was perhaps more accurately a reflection of de Gaulle’s view of the world and his love of France. In his memoirs of World War II he wrote, “All of my life I have thought of France in a certain way. France cannot be France without greatness.” But de Gaulle’s sentiment went beyond national pride to a chauvinism that made compromise intolerable. Under “Gaullism,” France would be unified and stable under strong leadership. To the outside world, France “must be a cultural and political beacon that influenced the destiny of all mankind.”

So, why would the French president who loved to hate the Americans now agree to loan the Mona Lisa to President and Mrs. Kennedy? Perhaps de Gaulle’s quest for international stature during the Cold War years would sway him.

Malraux’s comments had already made headlines in Washington the morning after his response to Edward Folliard at the Overseas Writers luncheon. On Saturday, May 12, the words “Mona Lisa, Other Louvre Works May Be Shown At National Gallery” were splashed across the front page of the Washington Post.

Although de Gaulle thought Malraux was overly impressed with the Kennedys, he was willing to indulge his cultural minister’s desire to reach out diplomatically at a moment of acute tension. Perhaps the loan might soothe American resentments toward France and influence U.S. leaders to give ground to France in international affairs. Later de Gaulle would call the Mona Lisa’s journey “a considerable operation and altogether beneficial,” while retaining his characteristic bite. “When it gets to New York,” he said, “for God’s sake don’t let the United Nations cash in on it.”

Meanwhile, Malraux continued his packed schedule of official meetings and less formal occasions in Washington, D.C. After a day of diplomatic maneuvering at the State Department, he was ready to relax. At 8:00 P.M. he was escorted to the private residence of Attorney General Robert Kennedy at Hickory Hill, twenty minutes outside Washington. Malraux was greeted at the door by a group of boisterous children and enormous dogs. As was her custom, Ethel Kennedy said grace before dinner, but she did so in French in honor of her European guest. The following morning, Malraux attended a stag luncheon at Blair House hosted by prominent journalist Edward R. Murrow, Director of the United States Information Agency.

On Sunday, Malraux and his wife joined President and Mrs. Kennedy, this time at Glen Ora, a handsome four-hundred-acre estate in Middleburg, Virginia, for a champagne brunch. The estate, located in the heart of fox-hunting country, featured a French-style villa, stables, and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. (It had been leased by the Kennedys, who used it as a weekend retreat.) Jackie presented an impressive meal for Malraux and a handful of invited guests who relaxed amid the panoramic views of the rolling Virginia pastures.

Then in New York City on May 15, Malraux delivered an exultant address for the fiftieth anniversary of the French Institute. The event was so important to Jackie that she had previously written to Vice President Lyndon Johnson to urge him in her unique manner to act as the administration’s representative at the affair:

It is such an important occasion and you are the only person who could properly respond to Malraux . . . his visit here is such an important one—for all the cultural side of our Country.

His speech in New York will be a major one—and it is so vital that the most important and the most eloquent person—you—be there. I know how busy you are—and I wouldn’t write if I didn’t think that he and his visit are so significant.

That evening Johnson delivered a rousing speech entitled “Defiance of Man’s Fate,” purportedly written by Arthur Schlesinger. In welcoming Malraux, Johnson declared: “Many men have been artists, and many have been men of ideas, and many have been men of action. Our guest’s triumph has been to fuse all these things into a single life. His example brings home a basic truth of our age: that, in our time, the world of ‘culture’ and the world of ‘politics’ are no longer separate and apart.”

In his address Malraux lectured eloquently on the crucial role of culture in the long fight for the freedom of man. “Culture is the free world’s most powerful guardian against the demons of its dreams, its most powerful ally in leading humanity to a dream worthy of man—because it is the heritage of the world’s nobility,” he declared. In concluding his remarks, Malraux paid generous tribute to the host nation of America: “I offer a toast to the only nation that has waged war but not worshipped it, that has won the greatest power in the world but not sought it, that has wrought the greatest weapon of death but not wished to wield it; and may it inspire men with dreams worthy of its action.”

After returning home to Paris following his seven-day visit to the United States, Malraux had barely resumed work at the culture ministry when on June 3, 1962, a chartered Air France jet crashed shortly after takeoff at the Orly Paris Airport. The fiery blast killed more than 120 American tourists, and many of the victims were members of the Atlanta Arts Association who had made a month-long pilgrimage to Europe to see the world’s great artistic treasures. The highlight of the art lovers’ trip had been a visit to the Louvre to view Whistler’s Mother, painted by American-born artist James McNeill Whistler. At the time, the crash was history’s worst single airplane disaster, and as the city struggled with the human loss, the tragedy became known as “the day Atlanta died.”

Shortly after news of the catastrophe reached André Malraux, the minister wrote a note of sympathy to Mrs. Kennedy. In the letter he promised that as a tribute to the deceased he would send the Whistler portrait to America. “Just as one places on a tomb the flowers that the dead would have liked,” wrote Malraux, “France wishes to place in the Atlanta Museum, for whatever period it may suggest, the work that it would perhaps choose among all others.”

Within days of the tragedy, French officials began preparations to loan the painting for exhibition to the fine arts museum in Atlanta. In Washington, John Walker heard rumblings about the proposed loan, but as it did not concern the National Gallery, he paid little attention. He did not know it at the time, but the crash of the airliner at Orly and the French gesture to commemorate the victims through the exhibition of Whistler’s Mother set in motion a chain of events that guaranteed the arrival of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece.

Walker was relieved when there were no further comments in the press about the possibility of a Mona Lisa exhibition. The treatment and care of Old Master paintings was Walker’s specialty, and he believed extremely fragile works of art should never move needlessly from continent to continent. The Mona Lisa was no exception.

Fortunately for Walker, the decision on whether to allow the Mona Lisa to leave Paris was not one that Minister Malraux could make alone. It would require the sanction of President de Gaulle, the French cabinet, and the council of ministers. Securing unanimous agreement from such divergent figures appeared virtually impossible.

The Mona Lisa topic, however, was of keen interest to Walker’s board of trustees and in particular Gallery benefactor Chester Dale, the Wall Street titan who could be mistaken for a middleweight boxer. Walker was caught off guard when Dale quizzed him about Malraux’s pledge concerning a possible loan of the Mona Lisa.

Walker felt that his primary duty as director of the National Gallery was to serve the museum’s board, but he was hard-pressed to satisfy the demands of the smart and hard-nosed Chester Dale. A longtime Gallery trustee, Dale’s temperament was as “fiery as his red hair.” The wealthy stockbroker and avid art collector frequently called Walker on the telephone and barked autocratic orders. Walker confided to Jackie how difficult it was to cope with the opinionated Dale, telling her that when he heard the words “Chester Dale is on the phone!” he would gird himself for the worst. Dale’s wife Mary and his close friends and colleagues always strung the collector’s two names together and he was known as CHESTERDALE.

Chesterdale called Walker with daily demands, and the museum official claimed that the tense, drawn-out conversations afflicted him with acute bursitis. Walker was rarely obsequious with Dale, and the aging art connoisseur liked it that way. Yet Dale constantly terrorized Walker with the threat that he might recall his loaned art collection from the Gallery at any moment. Chesterdale’s coveted collection was unparalleled, including some of the Gallery’s most famous works such as Mary Cassatt’s Boating Party, Renoir’s Girl With a Watering Can, and Gauguin’s self-portrait (not to mention master works by Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Delacroix, Morisot, and Pissaro).

When Chesterdale got wind of Malraux’s intentions for the Mona Lisa, he insisted that Walker drop everything and immediately write Malraux in Paris, informing him that the Gallery would be delighted to accept the Mona Lisa for exhibition in Washington. In an effort to keep the peace, Walker wrote the cultural minister on June 4: “Mr. Chester Dale, the president of our board of trustees, and the other members of our acquisitions committee, which decide upon all works of art exhibited at the Gallery, were naturally delighted by the opportunity such a loan would provide to show the American people one of the greatest masterpieces in existence.

“Everyone in this country would appreciate such a gesture from the Louvre,” Walker added. “I am writing you now to say that the National Gallery of Art is ready at any time to work out such a loan with the appropriate officials. Naturally the greatest precautions for the security of this marvelous treasure would have to be decided upon.”

Walker’s missive to Paris appeared sincere but Walker revealed later that he was adamantly opposed to the proposal. He also had little fear that the exhibition would come to fruition because he thought officials from the Louvre would never approve of a plan that posed such a great risk to an important masterpiece. French authorities would never permit the painting to leave Paris.

So Walker was understandably unsettled when reporters from the Washington Post caught wind of his letter to the French cultural minister and quoted lines from it in the newspaper. In comments to the press, Walker was careful to stress that his message only represented a “very preliminary step” toward discussions concerning the remote possibility.

“Before the art loan could be arranged,” he said, “many complex problems would have to be solved.” Should the exhibition become a reality, security for the artifact would be the primary challenge. Providing total security for the Mona Lisa, he cautioned, could never be guaranteed.

Two weeks later Walker was stunned to learn that an elderly man had thrown a bottle of black ink at an important drawing by Leonardo da Vinci at London’s National Gallery. Museum guards had been stationed nearby but were unable to stop the attack. British officials were still analyzing the work to assess the damage. The incident intensified Walker’s raw fear over the dangers that might be unleashed through Mona Lisa’s Washington exhibition.

In the history of the National Gallery, not a single painting had been vandalized or stolen. Walker intended to keep it that way and had instituted elaborate security precautions, including nighttime patrolling museum guards, use of a trained police dog, and pioneering electronic surveillance. One night, however, there had been an attempted theft. After the public had been cleared out of the building and the great bronze doors were closed, Walker wrote in his memoirs, a man was found in a telephone booth. The visitor was slumped to the floor and claimed he had had a heart attack. The guards rushed for a wheelchair and commandeered a taxi. As the man climbed into the car, his coat fell open, revealing a pistol. When he was searched, guards found tools for cutting wire and glass. The amount of harm that could have been done to the nation’s precious artworks was incalculable. “These were some of my worries,” Walker said of the unknown threats at his museum in an “age of vandalism.”

On June 10, Jackie surprised Walker by telephoning investment banker André Meyer and telling him how much she had enjoyed the exhibition of his collection of paintings on display at the National Gallery. (This was the second collection compiled by Meyer and his wife, who had begun to collect paintings in Paris in the early 1920s. The first collection had been lost during the war.) The extraordinary paintings by Monet, Chagall, and Picasso received special treatment by Walker’s staff and, following their removal from the Meyers’ New York apartment, they came to Washington in a National Gallery convoy with a special police escort.

“You are the kindest, nicest, most thoughtful person in the world,” Walker told Jackie. “André Meyer told me you had taken the trouble to telephone him and to describe your visit to the Gallery and your impression of his pictures. Needless to say, nothing could have pleased him more and nothing could have been more helpful to the Gallery. I am more grateful than I can say.”

On the 13th of June, Walker sailed to Europe to spend the summer with his wife and children at his home outside London, and days slipped past with no contact from André Malraux following his widely covered Washington visit. News of the possible exhibition, however, had spread throughout the eastern seaboard. Mrs. Albert D. Lasker, wife of the advertising mogul and one of eight women enlisted for Jackie’s White House Fine Arts Committee, wrote Walker on June 21 to say that she was anxious to borrow the Mona Lisa to display in the French Pavilion at the World’s Fair to be held at Flushing Meadows in Spring 1964. “I am sure curators of the French museums will fight against its coming,” she wrote. “Have you any magic powers or ingenious ideas on how we could overcome this?”

Walker managed to pass the next six weeks without any further Mona Lisa headaches, but on July 28 he received a handwritten note from Nicole Alphand, wife of the French ambassador. Known for combining social pleasures with politics, Nicole was a key player in Paris and Washington society. She fashioned the French Embassy into the center of Washington haut monde and was closely associated with both André Malraux and Jackie.

Following Nicole Alphand’s lighthearted account of her summer escapades, the note included an important message relayed from Minister Malraux that a loan of the Mona Lisa would not be possible after all: “I spoke to André Malraux, who wanted very much to see you at any time you wish,” she wrote Walker. “For la Joconde, as you thought it seemed more or less impossible to take the risk of having it travel, by boat or plane—but as you suggested it would be easier to send the ‘Mother’ of Whistler.

“We wrote to Mrs. Kennedy about it,” she added. She went on to explain that Malraux would be grateful if Jackie could present Whistler’s Mother to the National Gallery and to the museum in Atlanta as a tribute following the Orly plane disaster.

Walker was undoubtedly relieved. The exhibition of the Mona Lisa had been nipped in the bud. In her place would arrive the brooding icon of motherhood owned by the Musée d’Orsay that had already safely toured the United States in the 1930s. (The picture of the white-capped Victorian woman had become a familiar symbol for family values, and the U.S. Post Office had used a stylized version of the image on a stamp issued in 1934.) It was one of the best-known paintings in the world, and it would come to America with little fanfare and none of the headaches required for the security of the Mona Lisa.

John and Margaret Walker had been happily married for more than twenty-five years. “A wife in any career is important—in a museum career she is vital,” Walker acknowledged. The National Gallery’s growth was dependent on gifts, and for this reason a museum director must know how to entertain with a certain sophistication and charm. “If his wife is inexperienced in these matters, though he may have scholarly ability, skill as an administrator, remarkable connoisseurship, the result can be, as I have seen with many of my colleagues, disastrous.”

The couple had wed on February 3, 1937, in Rome at a ceremony attended by throngs of diplomats and members of British, Italian, and American society. The young bride wore a white satin gown and veil of Earl Brussels lace held in place by a wreath of orange blossoms. After the wedding, the couple knelt for prayers at the Tomb of the Prince of the Apostles at Saint Peter’s.

At the time of the nuptials, Margaret’s father, Sir Eric Drummond, was the British Ambassador to Italy. Margaret had grown up in the rarified world of foreign service, and after many years of her family’s association with the British embassy, she had developed sophisticated skills in the social arts. “Margaret’s many years of embassy training were invaluable,” Walker said. “She could handle people with self-confidence and ease.”

Walker embraced life in the city of Rome, where he taught and studied fine art at the American Academy. At the age of thirty-one, Walker thought he and Margaret would spend the rest of their lives in the Eternal City. His years as a pupil at Bernard Berenson’s Villa I Tatti had been a “sojourn in paradise,” and after he had moved on to the American Academy in Rome, Walker kept in close touch with the renowned art authority. (After the war, Walker visited “B. B.” every summer until Berenson’s death in 1959.)

When Walker was offered the position of Chief Curator at the National Gallery in Washington, Margaret insisted that he take the job. She felt he was too young to become an expatriate, and Margaret saw the offer as a momentous opportunity. “How much I owe her,” Walker later recalled. He was appointed the museum’s chief curator in 1938 and arrived when the new building designed by John Russell Pope was still under contruction. It was also the same time that the great art collection of Samuel H. Kress was to be gifted to the National Gallery. Under Walker’s guidance, the Kress collection came to include works by many of the greatest European artists, such as Giotto, Sandro Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippa, Raphael, Titian, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Francesco Guardi, and Canaletto.

The best of these were destined for the National Gallery, and the dime-store tycoon would be the first of the American moguls to answer Andrew Mellon’s call to augment his gift with outstanding pictures worthy of a truly national museum. The Kress experts worked closely with the Gallery’s first director, David Finley, as well as with Walker to further the Kress goal, which was “to create the most complete collection of Italian art existing in the world.” In March 1941 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the National Gallery of Art, accepting the magnificent building on behalf of the nation, the public stepped through the doors and found a breathtaking display of paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection.

At the nascent institution, Walker’s finely honed traits of “charm, sophistication and savoir-faire” were essential to realizing his major objective—to snare the great collections of America’s wealthiest citizens. For the next eighteen years, Walker would hunt down the best art in America and its best collectors. During his quest he said he came to learn the foibles, eccentricities, and egotisms of the wealthy donors who were his targets. “Their wealth, inherited or accumulated, made possible my career,” he said candidly.

Walker’s most “nefarious activity” as director of the National Gallery had been in connection with the eight masterpieces painted by Paul Cézanne, and the story of their ownership illustrated the ruthless nature of Walker’s desire to obtain the finest objects for the Gallery. “I still feel ashamed,” Walker confessed later, “but museum directors on the whole are heartless [when it comes to] benefiting their institutions.”

The mystery started to unravel shortly after John Kennedy’s inauguration. Jackie had telephoned Walker at his office and said that she and the President had received a memo from Dean Rusk stating that, under the will of Charles A. Loeser, eight works by Paul Cézanne had been left to the White House. Jackie said she had seen and admired some of the pictures displayed at the National Gallery without knowing that they belonged (at least temporarily) to her.

“What do you have to say?” she asked sternly. Walker wanted to tell her that Rusk should have been concentrating on the war in Vietnam and not concerning himself with the Cézannes, but instead he proceeded to explain the long and twisted tale about how he obtained the precious pictures.

Loeser had purchased a dozen works by Cézanne for only a few thousand francs each, but by the time of his death the paintings were enormously valuable (some were worth as much as $2 million each). Under the terms of Loeser’s will, his daughter Matilda had a life estate in all twelve paintings, but following Matilda’s death, eight of the pictures would pass to the White House or the American Embassy in Paris.

On one of his perennial trips to woo donors, Walker had visited the sister of Lessing Rosenwald, who had a small collection of impressionist and postimpressionist canvasses of outstanding quality. To Walker’s astonishment, on the wall of her dining room was a still life painted by Paul Cézanne. He recognized it immediately as one of the twelve pictures once owned by Charles Loeser. Rosenwald’s sister explained to Walker that she had recently purchased the picture. “Isn’t it marvelous?” she asked.

He nodded in agreement and told her it was a major work, one of the finest landscapes ever painted by Cézanne. Walker was stunned that Loeser’s daughter would part with one of her father’s prized pictures and sell it at auction.

Walker had known Matilda Loeser since the days when Walker resided with Bernard Berenson at the Villa I Tatti. When he visited Florence, Walker called on Matilda and joined her for tea. An empty hook was visible where the picture had once hung. Walker spoke with Matilda for quite some time and discussed the details of her father’s will. He told her that he hoped the eight Cézannes promised to the White House were properly insured. He pointed out the responsibility of serving as custodian of government property and expounded on how much he feared that something might happen to one of his artworks at the museum and he might someday be accused of negligence and end up in Leaven-worth Prison.

Matilda finally grew so frightened that she said that she would permanently renounce her life interest in the valuable paintings. Walker was invited to take the Cézannes any time he wished—“the sooner the better.”

The eight Loeser Cézanne’s were packed and eventually sent to the American Embassy in Paris. Walker then returned to Washington and managed to obtain a letter signed by President Truman stating that the pictures were unsuitable for the White House. Walker then set out to convince U.S. Ambassador David Bruce, a longtime friend once married to Ailsa Mellon, the only daughter of Andrew Mellon, to send the valuable pictures to the museum. If the pictures could be shipped to Washington, Walker told Bruce, he would see to it that they were restored to perfect condition and preserved for the ages. “All this would cost the embassy nothing,” Walker said. “We were only too happy to help.”

Bruce agreed and the paintings were shipped to the National Gallery. “Our eight Cézannes were an essential part of our representation of French 19th Century painting,” he said. “I was proud of them and though they bore the label ‘Gift of Charles Loeser, property of the United States,’ a wording unlike the ascriptions on our other labels, I came to look on them as belonging to our permanent collection.”

Walker told Jackie that he regretted his insolent intrusion into the life of Matilda Loeser, but he claimed he did what had to be done to safeguard the eight master works. Upon hearing the full story of his “devious machinations,” Jackie agreed to be merciful.

Walker saw the pictures on the walls of the White House for the first time in May 1961. As he stood inside the formal Green Room staring at the Cézannes, a strange sense of self-satisfaction overcame him. The sublime pictures that once hung on the walls of Loeser’s Florentine villa now belonged to Jackie.

When Walker returned to Washington in September, he resumed his duties attending to matters connected with the National Gallery. The weather had cooled and, with the start of fall, it was business as usual at the museum. As the director boarded an airplane bound for New York on Gallery business, he was summoned back to the gate by an urgent telephone call from the White House. Walker picked up the telephone and immediately recognized Jackie’s voice, “breathless with the news” that Minister André Malraux had agreed to send the Mona Lisa to Washington after all.

Walker was stunned. Jackie informed him that the exhibition of the picture was now possible because it would be sent as a personal loan to her and President Kennedy. The promise of May 11 whispered in the First Lady’s ear by Minister Malraux at the state dinner in his honor would now come to fruition. President de Gaulle had approved of the plan and the painting would arrive in Washington before Christmas.

Because the Mona Lisa would be sent to America as a personal loan to the Kennedys, the French leader could make all the necessary arrangements without the restraints posed by most museum-to-museum exhibitions. In this manner, de Gaulle could set the exhibition in motion without the sanction of officials from the Louvre.

Caught off guard, Walker attempted to make it clear that he would not support the plan. He was absolutely against the loan of fragile art objects, and favored museum stipulations that forbid certain artworks to be loaned. Even a layperson had to acknowledge that a four-hundred-fifty-year-old picture painted on wood could not travel well thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean at the height of winter.

Walker was unflappable on this point: great works of art were to be preserved for the ages. There was always a risk involved in the shipment of art objects, and to take any unnecessary risk with such fragile material was unthinkable.

On October 10, Jackie asked Walker to meet with her at the White House. When Walker arrived she told him that she had received the official letter from Minister Malraux indicating that he was sending the Mona Lisa to America for exhibition with the stipulation that it was a personal loan to the President and First Lady.

“Then the blow fell,” Walker remembered. “Mrs. Kennedy said she had discussed Minister Malraux’s proposal with the President, and they had decided that as the loan, to their amazement, was being made to them, they would have to find someone to be responsible for the safety of the picture from the time it arrived in America until it was returned to the Louvre.”

The request to safeguard the Mona Lisa unnerved Walker, to say the least. He was certain that the plan would damage the revered cultural symbol, thereby embarrassing the nation and breaking Jackie’s heart. He feared the exhibition would end in disaster and finish his career; he would be tarred with the shame of orchestrating an exhibition based on the political whims of the Kennedy administration. If the President insisted that the plan for the exhibition proceed, Walker felt he would have no choice but to relinquish his post as Director of the National Gallery.

It was the first test of their decades-old friendship, and soon the Mona Lisa issue became an emotional clash of wills as Walker repeated his appeal to change Jackie’s mind. He emphasized the danger inherent in the venture. To Walker, the idea of moving a fragile masterpiece thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean tempted fates that should never be tested. The whole scheme reeked of American arrogance, and he urged Jackie to abandon the plan. To Walker’s surprise, instead of reacting with apprehension, Jackie responded with mild amusement. The risk to the painting was real, she said, but exaggerated. To prove the point, she reminded Walker that Malraux had determined that the painting was in good enough shape to travel and the trip had been approved and sanctioned by French officials—including President Charles de Gaulle.

The exhibition of the Mona Lisa was the perfect expression of Jackie’s interest in intermingling art with politics; she had somehow constructed the ideal union of culture and diplomacy. As First Lady she saw the loan of the masterpiece as a source of pride for both her and the nation, a loan that would lift the image of America abroad and elevate the interest in the cultural arts at home. In her mind the exhibition was the “ultimate cultural statement” about the power of the United States and her allies. It further bolstered the President’s Cold War efforts to portray America as the epitome of a free society that advocated widespread support of the fine arts. “The United States will be judged—and its place in history ultimately assessed—not alone by its military or economic power, but by the quality of its civilization,” observed Kennedy arts consultant August Heckscher. Jackie believed deeply that a public connection to the arts elevated America’s international posture and served to enhance the well-being, happiness, and fulfillment of its democratic citizens.

Also important to Jackie, the exhibition of the Mona Lisa was a generous gesture of amity by André Malraux, the leading cultural figure in France and an intellect she deeply admired. A national policy that supported international exchange in the arts strengthened international alliances and played a critical cultural role in fighting the Cold War.

In the world of John Walker, however, objects of art never had a role in the gritty world of politics. If the painting arrived safely, it would be a defining moment for the administration and all Americans, but if the painting was damaged it would cause an irreparable rift with the French people and destroy one of history’s great artifacts. Walker wanted no part of it.