NEWPORT
After Air Force One landed at Quonset Naval Air Station in Newport, Kennedy warned Ben Bradlee and his wife, Tony, that he needed to spend a few minutes doing what he called “a little toe dance” with Rhode Island’s new Republican governor, John Chaffee. He was livid when he rejoined them in the helicopter taking them to Hammersmith Farm, the waterfront estate of Jackie’s stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss. Chaffee had given him a cheap silver-plated vase as an anniversary gift, an obvious all-purpose present accompanied by a printed card announcing, “The Governor of Rhode Island.” Kennedy, who was scrupulous about writing notes and observing the social graces, was appalled that Chaffee had not bothered to sign the card. Even worse, the official cameraman had failed to capture the welcoming ceremony and Chaffee had grabbed back the vase and insisted on running through everything again, speeches and all. “Boy, he learns fast,” Kennedy said. “I didn’t have that much brass until I’d been in Congress five years . . . pushing a president around like that.” He mentioned the vase all weekend, each time suggesting a new way to get even with Chaffee and “put him in his place”—threats as hollow as posting the Otis officer to Alaska or making Ambassador McCloskey restore Mary Ryan’s yard.
He landed at twilight on the lawn in front of Hammersmith Farm. As he disembarked, Jackie came running and greeted him with an embrace that the Bradlees thought was the most affectionate they had ever seen them exchange. As he entered the house, he handed his mother-in-law Chaffee’s vase, calling it “a token of my undying affection.” Missing his sarcasm, she thanked him profusely but eyed it with dismay, probably wondering for how long she would have to display it. He finally admitted that it had been a present from the people of Rhode Island, and asked, “Don’t you think it was a funny thing for the governor to hand it to me this way?”
Twelve hundred guests had attended the Kennedys’ wedding reception at Hammersmith Farm in 1953, dining and dancing under a vast white marquee. The New York Times reported the event on its front page, describing the guests as “the cream of society and important government officials,” and saying that no marriage had elicited such intense public interest since the famous Astor-French nuptials of 1934. Twelve people had gathered to celebrate the Kennedys’ tenth anniversary. They included a former bridesmaid, Jackie’s mother, stepfather, half brother and sister, the Bradlees, and Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island and his wife. Over cocktails, Jackie gave Kennedy three scrapbooks titled “The White House Before and After,” “The President’s Park,” and “The Making of a Garden.” One chronicled the transformation of the Rose Garden and contained well-chosen quotations about gardening written in her hand, accompanied by photographs showing how the garden had looked on a particular day and his schedule for that day. The White House head usher, J. B. West, who had watched her laboring over these scrapbooks for months, compared them to “fine art books.”
He reciprocated by reading out loud a letter from Klejman listing the antiquities he had brought from Washington. They included a Greek statue, an ancient Egyptian head, and some bracelets. Nothing cost less than a thousand dollars, and some items cost much more. He omitted the prices and told her to choose what she wanted, but repeatedly said, “Now, you can only keep one; you have to choose.” The expression of faint alarm crossing his face as he proceeded down the list made it apparent that he was reading it, and the accompanying prices, for the first time. As he came to the most expensive items he whispered to Bradlee, “Got to steer her away from that one.” She chose a gold bracelet resembling a coiled serpent because, she said, “It was the simplest thing of all and I could see how he loved it.”
Her gift to him had required months of thought and labor. His had been organized at the last minute with a single phone call and was almost as hurried and impersonal as Chaffee’s vase. He redeemed himself when they exchanged their more personal gifts. When he had knelt at her bedside weeping after Patrick’s death, she had begged him for something that would remind her of their son. Now he gave her the gold ring with green emerald chips symbolizing that their son had fought like an Irishman to live. She reciprocated with a gold-plated St. Christopher medal fashioned into a money clip that she had ordered from Tiffany’s to replace the one he had slipped into Patrick’s coffin. After the anniversary she would write Charlie Bartlett an effusive letter, telling him that Jack had helped “re-attach” her to life following Patrick’s death, and made her appreciate “all the lucky things” they shared. She believed that he could have lived a “worthwhile life” without being happily married, but without him, hers would have been “a wasteland.”
She took Ben and Tony Bradlee aside later that evening and with tears glistening in her eyes said, “You two really are our best friends.” It struck Ben Bradlee as a forlorn remark, the kind that “a lost and lonely child desperately in need of any kind of friend” might make. He doubted they were really their best friends, but the comment touched him and he wrote in his diary that because the Kennedys were so remote and independent, those rare occasions when they revealed their emotions were especially moving. The year before, Jackie had made a similarly impetuous declaration to her personal secretary, Mary Gallagher, suddenly embracing her and saying through tears, “You know, you’re my only friend in this impersonal White House.” Gallagher was taken aback, since they had recently been embroiled in an acrimonious dispute over her salary and civil service rank.
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DURING THEIR LONG WEEKEND in Newport the Bradlees and Kennedys followed the same schedule: swimming at Bailey’s Beach Club in the morning, lunch and a cruise on the Honey Fitz, then golf at the Newport Country Club. Jackie was not a keen golfer but tagged along, riding in the cart with her husband and even playing thirteen holes on Saturday. A home movie taken during one of their Honey Fitz outings shows him fingering a cigar, twiddling his sunglasses, and stroking John or Caroline, anything to keep his hands in motion. He gave John a swimming lesson in the pool and sat with him in a beached dinghy, teaching him how to row. He sent a cable to Lyndon Johnson, who had suffered excruciating pain from kidney stones throughout his Scandinavian trip, urging him to “pay more attention to the doctors than you usually do.” Johnson’s gaffe-filled trip had produced more ill will than good, but Kennedy generously praised him as “the best of our ambassadors.”
He decided to split the next summer between rented houses in Hyannis Port and Newport, and asked Senator Pell to persuade the owner of Annandale Farm, the fifteen-acre waterfront estate bordering Hammersmith Farm, to rent it to them for August and September but not to tell Jackie. He knew it would make her happy and wanted to surprise her. She had grown up in Newport during the summers, had friends there, and preferred it to Hyannis Port. He was more conflicted, once complaining to a friend, “All around me I see ponies and horses running around the backyard. What the hell is there for me to do?” Still, it had great waters for sailing, and he liked Hammersmith Farm enough that while Jackie was in Italy he had invited himself for the weekend and had asked her mother if he could return again, sleeping next time in Jackie’s childhood room, the same one they had shared as newlyweds.
He and Jackie attended Sunday Mass at the same church where they had been married. As they were driving to Bailey’s Beach Club he stopped to talk with some nuns standing in a crowd along the road. “Jackie here always wanted to be a nun,” he told them mischievously. “She went to a convent school and really planned to take the orders.”
It was at about this moment that a box of dynamite hidden near the basement steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham exploded, killing four young black girls on their way to Sunday school. The bombing had been perpetrated by four members of an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan and was one of the landmark atrocities of the civil rights struggle, but it appears to have had surprisingly little impact on Kennedy, which is doubly curious since anything threatening the lives or happiness of innocent children usually engaged his emotions. Bradlee devoted several pages of his book Conversations with Kennedy to recounting their anniversary weekend but made no mention of his reaction to the deaths of the four girls.
After leaving Bailey’s Beach Club, Kennedy took his usual luncheon cruise and played golf. His phone logs show that after coming off the links he called Bobby, probably to discuss the bombing and send Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall to Birmingham. He also decided to return to Washington that evening instead of the following morning, but the notes he made on the plane showed that his mind was not on the bombing, and included reminders such as “speeches for Western trip.”