Life at the White House, and Away
Jackie was just finishing improvements to the living quarters, and her restoration plans were still in their infancy, when Caroline and John arrived at the White House on February 4, 1961. To welcome three-year-old Caroline and two-month-old John to their new home, one of the White House gardeners fashioned a life-size snowman at the edge of the driveway.
As the Kennedy family moved into the nation’s best-known address, Jackie was more concerned than ever about maintaining their privacy. For Caroline, one of the most recognized children on the planet, Jackie’s worries were especially acute. “She is going to have to go to school,” Jackie said in an April interview. “And if she is in the papers all the time, that will affect her little classmates, and they will treat her differently.” Once, in Hyannis Port, Caroline wandered into the frame while Look photographer Stanley Tretick was photographing Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s children. Quickly he caught several playful photos of Caroline horsing around with her cousins. Laura Bergquist showed them to JFK on Tretick’s behalf; Jack loved them. But Jackie vetoed his approval of their publication. “It is partly because [the pictures] are so good I must sadly tell you I just can’t give you permission to publish them,” Jackie wrote to Bergquist, cushioning the rejection in praise. “Caroline was being recognized wherever she went. That is a strange enough thing to get used to at any age—but pretty sad when one is only three. Every article just increases interest in her—her little friends and cousins see it and mention it to her and it is all bad for her.” In fact, the most powerful man on earth had to subvert his wife in order to get any pictures of the children published. “Some of the most enduring images of the Kennedy years—‘John John’ peeking out from underneath his father’s desk, Caroline eating chocolate in Evelyn Lincoln’s office—were organized by their father while Jackie was out of town,” historian Sally Bedell Smith wrote. It never failed to irritate the first lady.
Certainly, Jackie’s own painful memories of being teased when her divorcing parents were in the newspaper must have had something to do with her extreme wariness of the press and her children. But Jackie also was determined that her children be raised to be polite, levelheaded, civilized people, and she worried about the power of attention—even or especially positive attention—to warp and spoil a child.
Her children were always to address adults formally (Maud Shaw would always be “Miss Shaw” to them), and pleases and thank yous were strictly enforced. Jackie herself always addressed the children in an adult manner, never talking down to them. On the other hand, she was hardly the distant, formal mother typical of a woman of her class. “She usually had her youngsters in tow,” said James Ketchum of the White House Curator’s Office. “Mrs. Kennedy had the kids more than Miss Shaw, which was a great shock to me.”
When they lived in Georgetown, Caroline had attended a playgroup, which several of the mothers took turns hosting. Once in the White House, one of the ways that Jackie was able to maintain Caroline’s privacy was to request that the playgroup meet at the White House exclusively. The playgroup was run cooperatively—the parents all contributed toward expenses—and by the fall it had blossomed into a nursery school, with two teachers, a playground on the South Lawn, and a schoolroom in the sunny third-floor solarium. By the fall of 1962, the nursery school had grown to twenty four- and five-year-old students (many of them children of administration officials) and included a kindergarten.
Meanwhile, Jackie adjusted grudgingly to her role as first lady, skipping out on as many official responsibilities as she could. “Jackie was not ready to spend her days observing the abominable rituals delegated to the first lady,” wrote Laurence Leamer. “Attending luncheons with the wives of senators and representatives, meeting ambassadors’ wives from obscure nations, promoting one charity or cause after another, mouthing banal comments. She had almost as many excuses as she had invitations, and she avoided all but the most public and important functions.”
Luckily, she had many women who were able to take her place on short notice. Tish Baldridge and Pamela Turnure took to referring to Lady Bird Johnson as “Saint Bird”; in Jackie’s first year at the White House, she asked Lady Bird to cover for her more than fifty times. Janet Auchincloss, Rose, Ethel, JFK’s sisters—all were pressed into service at some point during the Kennedy administration, most more than once. Jackie’s absence wasn’t always a last-minute cancellation. The truth is that she spent as much time away from the White House as she did living there, “mostly alone or with the children at Glen Ora or Hyannis Port, or on overseas trips with Lee,” wrote Sarah Bradford. Nancy Tuckerman remembered Jackie being gone—usually in the country—from Thursday to Monday or Tuesday.
Glen Ora was a seven-bedroom country house situated on four hundred verdant acres just over an hour’s drive outside of Washington in Middleburg, Virginia. Jackie had convinced Jack to rent the retreat before they’d even moved into the White House (she rejected Camp David out of hand, sight unseen) as a place for them to get away on the weekends. In truth it was of limited interest to Jack, who was allergic to horses, loved the ocean, and preferred to be around more people than just his immediate family in his downtime. But it was a place where Jackie could escape a White House that she sometimes found oppressive, where she and her children could get exercise in the fresh air and ride without constant fear of the press or much need for close Secret Service protection. Middleburg’s remoteness was appealing to Jackie for another reason: It was unattractive to journalists. “Middleburg was just plain boring,” wrote Secret Service Agent Clint Hill. “It was small, rural, and quiet. Nightlife was non-existent. Outside of monitoring the infrequent comings and goings of the Kennedys and their visitors, there was nothing to do, and nowhere else to go. The press hated Middleburg.”
Though the home was only a rental, Jackie and Sister Parish redecorated it from top to bottom. The two spent ten thousand dollars on everything from furniture to wallpaper to rugs. Jack was enraged at the expense but lived with it. Not only was Glen Ora a concession on behalf of Jackie’s happiness; her absence removed a level of stress from his compulsive philandering, which, though restricted mostly to the White House, was no less feverish than before.
The fact of JFK’s compulsive—indeed pathological—womanizing is now widely accepted by historians, no matter how well the press’s code of silence protected him at the time. “Kennedy had affairs with several women” while in the White House, wrote Robert Dallek, “including Pamela Turnure, Jackie’s press secretary; Mary Pinchot Meyer, Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law; two White House secretaries playfully dubbed Fiddle and Faddle; Judith Campbell Exner, whose connections to mob figures like Sam Giancana made her the object of FBI scrutiny; and Mimi Beardsley, a ‘tall, slender, beautiful’ nineteen-year-old college sophomore and White House intern. . . . There were also Hollywood stars and starlets and call girls paid by Dave Powers . . .”
An entire enabling apparatus composed of aides and Secret Service agents protected the president’s ready access to these women. Secret Service Agent Larry Newman ruefully remembered: “You were on the most elite assignment in the Secret Service, and you were there watching an elevator door because the president was inside with two hookers. It just didn’t compute. Your neighbors and everybody thought you were risking your life, and you were actually out there to see that he’s not disturbed while he’s having an interlude in the shower with two gals from Twelfth Avenue.”*
* Newman also remembered joking with his colleagues about which one of them would testify on Capitol Hill if and when “the president received harm or was killed in the room by these two women.” (Sabato, The Kennedy Half-Century , ch. 6)
Though Jackie seems to have had few illusions about Jack’s behavior, it still hurt and angered her. Though in the abstract she had a Continental acceptance of a “man’s nature,” and though her childhood with Black Jack had normalized a certain amount of infidelity, Jack’s continual need for so many fresh conquests was humiliating. Friends report that as late as 1958—five years into their marriage—she still wondered if she could bear to be married to such an unfaithful man. By the White House years, it seems that her attitude had hardened into one of resignation. Her outward response was generally one of bitter aplomb, as when she was showing a Parisian journalist around the White House. As they passed the secretary known as “Fiddle,” Jackie casually mentioned in French, “And there is the woman that my husband is supposed to be sleeping with.” (The journalist was apparently taken aback. “What is going on here?” he asked one of Pierre Salinger’s aides.)
Jack’s behavior is less a reflection of a loveless marriage than it is symptomatic of a man with a profoundly stunted capacity for intimacy with a woman. “I think that Jack in his way was enormously proud of Jackie,” Charlie Bartlett would later say. “I think he really adored her in his way. But it was in his way. It wasn’t exactly what Jackie needed. I think she needed a warmer, cozier husband, more constant. Jack was difficult, easily bored, and he liked to be amused—not what she needed.”
Jack and Jackie’s relationship was, to understate it by a great deal, complicated. Part of the enduring fascination with them both lies in our attempts to reconcile so much that is seemingly irreconcilable: his genuine heroism with his patently despicable personal behavior; Jackie’s intelligence and strength of character with her maddening willingness to take his abuse; our knowledge of the pain she must have felt with her adoring, nearly hagiographic, and apparently sincere memories of their married life. Through these contradictions, the Kennedys remain a puzzle, one with which we never tire of playing, no matter how impossible the solution.
When both were at the White House, the Kennedys took genuine pleasure in entertaining company; Jackie would often organize small dinner parties in their second-floor residence. “[Jack] never wanted to have the people in the evening that he worked with in the daytime,” she later remembered. “And I’d often say . . . ‘Why don’t we have Ethel and Bobby for dinner?’ because I thought Ethel’s feelings might be getting hurt. But he never wanted to see Bobby, and Bobby didn’t want to come either, because they’d worked all day. So you’d have people who were rather relaxing. You’d have Charlie Bartlett and the Bradlees a lot. It was sort of light.”
Sometimes the parties were larger, “a mixture of cabinet and friends from New York, and young people.” Jackie remembered:
I worked so hard on those parties because I felt once we were in the White House, I felt that I could get out, and I just can’t tell you how oppressive the strain of the White House can be. I could go out . . . but Jack couldn’t get out. So I used to try to make these parties to bring gay, and new people, and music, and make it happy nights. And did he love them. Just walked around, puffing his cigar . . .
“Best parties I’ve ever attended,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled. “The greatest girls, the nicest times. Everyone was so much better than normal. Everyone was the gayest and the prettiest and the nicest.”
One of Jackie’s great achievements as first lady was to prove equally as adept at entertaining in an official capacity as when she hosted their private soirees. She and her staff changed the complexion of state dinners, bringing glamour and vibrance to what had been very dull affairs. “They set a feeling of warmth and ease in all their entertaining which was very catching,” remembered Tish Baldridge. “Formerly guests would come to the White House in fear and trembling; it is an austere place. . . . But immediately, with the Kennedys, the whole atmosphere changed. Their guests were at ease and found it was a good party and lots of attractive people and pretty surroundings.” At Jackie’s direction, Jack’s state dinners were the first where smoking was permitted and hard alcohol available. Jackie eschewed the long, U-shaped table in favor of several smaller round tables, a move considered revolutionary at the time, and, whenever possible, she got rid of reception lines in favor of free-form mingling.
This convivial atmosphere made the White House a much more pleasant place for the new group of visitors Jackie brought there. Part of her crusade to make the White House a “grand house” was to bring in as many great artists, dancers, and musicians as she could. She arranged a performance of scenes from Shakespeare in the East Room for Sudanese president Ferik Ibrahim Abboud and a concert by virtuoso cellist Pablo Casals for the governor of Puerto Rico. Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev performed ballet at a state dinner for French Minister of Culture André Malraux, where the guest list included Tennessee Williams, Saul Bellow, Elia Kazan, Geraldine Page, Archibald MacLeish, Andrew Wyeth, and Arthur Miller. It was through Malraux that Jackie was eventually able to have the Mona Lisa brought to the United States, where it was displayed in the National Gallery—perhaps the strongest testament to her powers of persuasion.
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.