The Career Woman and the Distinguished Gentleman
Why Jackie eventually turned down the Prix de Paris, something for which she’d worked so hard and which seemed so in line with her interests, is something of a mystery. Historians and biographers offer several theories. Barbara Perry lists some possibilities: “Perhaps her mother and stepfather feared that she would fall back under the spell of Black Jack during the prize’s six-month stint in New York. Or they may have been concerned that she would become an expatriate if she moved to Paris for another long stay. Janet might have believed that her daughter . . . was falling behind in the ‘race’ to find a suitable mate . . .” Sarah Bradford quotes a source as saying that Jackie started the job at Vogue’s New York offices but didn’t even last the morning: An encounter with a flamboyantly gay staff member convinced Jackie that Vogue was no place to find a husband.
Instead, Jackie headed back to McLean, and the Auchinclosses. Eager to establish an income and a life beyond Merrywood, and interested in a career in writing, she used Auchincloss connections to secure an interview at the Washington Times-Herald. Starting with secretarial duties, she quickly agitated for a more substantial role at the paper. After much back and forth with the editor-in-chief, who worried that she was just marking time until the inevitable marriage proposal, she acquired the position of “Inquiring Photographer.” Jackie, trained in the use of a professional-quality camera, hit the streets asking citizens (and sometimes, members of Congress) their opinions on questions that she devised.
“You could make the column about anything you wanted to,” she said. “So I’d find a bunch of rough, salty characters and ask them about a prizefighter just so I could capture how they talked.”
More often than examining boxing, questions she asked seemed designed to playfully engage the age-old battle of the sexes. “Do you think a wife should let her husband think he’s smarter than she is?” she asked. “When did you discover that women are not the weaker sex?” “Are wives a luxury or a necessity?” She’d ask young women if they’d rather be “an old man’s darling or a young man’s slave?” It was not just her own family history that made her desperate to secure a fortune; every element in her milieu was urging marriage. The subject was undoubtedly on her mind. Which was only appropriate: By the time she took on her “Inquiring Photographer” job, she was engaged to be married.
There are differing accounts of when Jackie met and began a serious relationship with John Husted Jr., but we know that she accepted his proposal of marriage around Christmas, 1951. Husted was “tall, well-built, urbane, very handsome in a WASPish way,” said Mary de Limur Weinmann, who claimed to have introduced them in late 1951. A Yale-educated Wall Street investment banker, he seems to have fallen decisively for her, but the engagement was not to last very long. In mid-March, Husted visited Merrywood. When Jackie dropped him off at the airport, she silently took off the engagement ring and deposited it in the pocket of Husted’s suit jacket. “She didn’t say much and neither did I,” Husted would remember. “There wasn’t much you could say.”
A few factors contributed to the brevity of the engagement. Janet, having herself been disastrously married to an urbane, Yale-educated Wall Street man, was not in favor of the union. And Jackie confided her fears to friends that being married to an investment banker would be boring. But the biggest force that eclipsed John Husted was Jack Kennedy, the thirty-four-year-old senatorial candidate she’d met at Charlie Bartlett’s the previous summer. He’d found his way back onto Jackie’s radar.
Jack Kennedy was born in 1917, Joe and Rose’s second child. Growing up between Brookline and Hyannis Port, he enjoyed the intellectually and physically vigorous family life insisted on by his parents. As a boy he learned to sail and took part in the family’s famous touch-football games, known for their fierce, rough-and-tumble competitiveness. And the Kennedy family dinner table was always a place for spirited debates regarding the issues of the day. (Jackie would observe of the Kennedy dinner table: “If you didn’t get on the offensive, they’d have you on the defensive all night.”)
He was a bright, precocious child, and he attended some of the nation’s top schools: Boston Latin, Choate, Harvard. But he was never that great of a student. His consistently mediocre academic performance could be attributed to an intellect that was in need of constant stimulation. Another factor was almost certainly his poor health.
Chronically ill, Jack Kennedy was in and out of hospitals and clinics throughout his life, where doctors treated symptoms while attempting to diagnose the shifting constellation of his underlying ailments: gastroenterological problems, a serious adrenal deficiency called Addison’s disease, a degenerative back condition. Staying healthy would remain difficult as treatments for one condition would aggravate another. For example, steroids prescribed for digestive problems may have triggered his Addison’s disease and caused osteoporosis in his spine. His digestive problems kept him rail thin throughout his childhood and early manhood, and they gave him a gangly, sometimes gaunt appearance as he grew to just over six feet tall.
His back problems were exacerbated by the PT 109 incident. After returning from the war and spending much time dealing with stomach, back, and adrenal problems, Jack turned his attention to politics. In 1946 he campaigned for, and with the help of his father’s millions won, a seat as representative from Massachusetts. Though his record as a congressman was unexceptional, he was popular in his district and was reelected twice. Almost as soon as he took office in the House, he began eyeing the Senate, and he ran for the Senate in 1952. He was assured of victory by his own star power and his father’s considerably deep pockets.
JFK was an incredibly handsome and charismatic young man. The history books bulge with friends and acquaintances trying to define what made him so personally magnetic. American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, who socialized with both Jack and Jackie during their White House years, put it this way: “A remarkable combination of informality and stateliness—that’s not precisely the word—casualness and majesty. . . . It’s a funny thing: he could say, ‘Pass the salt,’ and I was deeply touched. It’s that quality he had which I am still hard-put to define . . . the thing that made him precious, beyond calculation.”
By the time Jackie met him, John F. Kennedy was one of the most sought-after men on the East Coast, a junior congressman with an eye on a Senate seat. She was to fall for his many virtues, and in time come to learn about the darker components of his complex personality.