Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy Read online

  Walking around the square, Jacqueline recalled learning while a student in Paris about how the French protected their vital buildings and places. She wished the House and Senate would "pass a law establishing something on the order of Monuments Historiques in France." (Congress did, in 1966.) As she wrote in a letter, she could not sit still while America's monuments were "ripped down and horrible things put up in their place. I simply panic at the thought of this and decided to make a last-minute appeal." In response, an eminent American architect complained that there was "practically nothing" on the square's west side worth preserving: "I hope Jacqueline Kennedy wakes up to the fact that she lives in the twentieth century." But Mrs. Kennedy prevailed. "Hold your breath," she wrote one of her co-conspirators. "All our wildest dreams come true. . . .The Dolley Madison and Tayloe houses will be saved!!!" Had someone else been First Lady, the vista seen from the Executive Mansion's north windows today might be very bleak.3 Among other capital monuments she managed to protect was the old gray mansard-crowned Executive Office Building, built in the 1870s next to the White House, which had once housed the Departments of State, War, and Navy.

  In January 1961, when the just-inaugurated President and his wife rode down Pennsylvania Avenue, they were newly reminded that L'Enfant's design for a grand ceremonial mile from Capitol to White House had given way to dilapidated tattoo parlors and souvenir stores. Sometimes at night, unbeknownst to the public, Jackie "would walk halfway" to the Capitol with Jack, as she later scrawled to her brother-in-law, Senator Edward Kennedy: "The tawdriness of the encroachments to the President's House depressed him. He wished to do something that would ensure a nobility of architecture along that Avenue which is the main artery of the Government of the United States. . . . He wished to emulate Thomas Jefferson, with whom he had such great instinctive affinity. . . . I just wanted to tell you with all my heart that this is one thing that really meant something to Jack." The President established a commission for the boulevard's redevelopment and oversaw it closely with his wife. Jacqueline recalled to Ted Kennedy that Pennsylvania Avenue was one of the last things "I remember Jack speaking about with feeling" before they left for Texas in November 1963.

  She famously recast the White House as a treasure house of historic American furniture, painting, sculpture, and artifacts that would rival world-renowned museums. For the hundred and sixty years after Abigail and John Adams became its first residents, presidential families had restyled the mansion's public rooms at their whim. When Jacqueline Kennedy first scrutinized them, her heart sank. The bad wallpaper and reproductions were "early Statler," she said, almost devoid of American history. She drafted a plan to persuade wealthy collectors (employing "my predatory instincts," she privately joked) to donate important American pieces; remake the public rooms, with careful research, into proper historical venues; and establish a White House Historical Association to keep some future president's wife whose aunt "ran a curio shop" from revamping those rooms to her own ahistorical taste. Especially after Jacqueline's televised tour of the newly remade White House rooms in February 1962, which was seen by fifty-six million viewers, the project helped make Americans more aware of their traditions in the decorative arts. Enduring too are certain other ways Mrs. Kennedy changed what she described as "the setting in which the presidency is presented to the world," including the contours of state dinners and other presidential ceremonies. She transformed the austere Oval Office into "a New England sitting room" by moving in sofas and easy chairs, unsealing its fireplace, and installing the massive H.M.S. Resolute desk, which has since been used by five of her husband's successors. It was at Jacqueline's request that the industrial designer Raymond Loewy invented the sky-blue and white design of today's presidential air fleet.

  Mrs. Kennedy also transformed the role of the First Lady. Since her restoration of the White House, a venture she conceived and assigned to herself, every president's wife has felt compelled to focus on some important public project. The thirty-one-year-old Jackie was serious when she said her preeminent job in the White House was to be wife and mother, but as Lady Bird Johnson later recalled, "She was a worker, which I don't think was always quite recognized." With that work ethic, it was natural that Jacqueline would take on the restoration project, although she knew it would prove exhausting. She had had a full-time job after graduation from college, which was unusual in her social group, and later, in 1975, when her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, had died, and both of her children were away at school, she took on a real job as a book editor at Viking and Doubleday, with a reputation for quality volumes of art and history that benefited from her taste, life experience, and expertise.

  Jackie's capacity for intellectual growth manifested itself in the 1970s with her embrace of the women's movement. She told a friend she had come to realize that she could not expect to live primarily through a husband. She championed various feminist causes, including Gloria Steinem's Ms. magazine, and despite her aversion to giving interviews, gave one in praise of working women for a 1979 cover story in Steinem's magazine, saying, "What has been sad for many women of my generation is that they weren't supposed to work if they had families."

  But in the early 1960s, all of this was in Jacqueline Kennedy's future. Retrospectively she felt that of equal importance to her White House restoration were her far less well known efforts as First Lady to save Abu Simbel. Alarmed to learn in 1962 that floods were threatening the exalted Egyptian monument, she wrote JFK, "It is the major temple of the Nile—13th century b.c. It would be like letting the Parthenon be flooded. . . . Abu Simbel is the greatest. Nothing will ever be found to equal it." Despite JFK's insistence that congressmen would dismiss Abu Simbel as some "Egyptian rocks," the First Lady's personal appeal to Capitol Hill won Egypt the necessary funds. When Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, offered to send one of his country's treasures to America as a thank-you gift, she requested the Temple of Dendur, which she and her husband hoped to install in Washington, D.C., to "remind people that feelings of the spirit are what prevent wars."

  John Kennedy would have been quick to affirm that the cultural milestones of his presidency—Pablo Casals and the American Ballet Theatre in the East Room, the Mona Lisa displayed in America, the dinner for Nobel laureates, the efforts to develop a national theater (now the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), and others—would most likely have been absent had he not married Jacqueline Bouvier. Both Kennedys insisted that the arts must be included in any definition of a full American life. The affluent society of the early 1960s was a propitious moment for such a statement. Many Americans, enjoying postwar prosperity, were pondering how to spend their newfound discretionary income in leisure hours that their struggling forebears could only have dreamt of.

  Jacqueline Kennedy's acute sense of how symbols and ceremony could shape American history was never more evident than during the long nightmare weekend after her husband's assassination. Remembering what she had read, while transforming the Mansion, about Abraham Lincoln's funeral, the most elaborate in the country's past before 1963, the stunned widow improvised three unforgettable days of tone-perfect ceremony—the ritual in the East Room and Capitol Rotunda, the foreign leaders walking to the strangely intimate old cathedral, JFK's beloved Air Force One flying in salute above the burial, the lighting of an eternal flame (like the one she had seen in Paris as a Sorbonne student). After Dallas, all of this helped Americans win back at least some portion of their self-respect. Once the melancholy pageant was over, Mrs. Kennedy's command of public gesture remained: when she and her children officially departed the White House for the last time, she saw to it that her son John was carrying an American flag.

  In the summer of 1964, after finishing her interviews with Arthur Schlesinger, she told a friend that recounting her bygone life had been "excruciating." Plagued by the commotion around her Georgetown home and torturous reminders of a happier time, she moved her family to an apartment high above Fifth Avenue in New York, seeking "a
new life in a new city." From her new bedroom windows, she could see, across the street, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, despite her preference for Washington, D.C., the Temple of Dendur was being installed, and at night, the floodlights bothered her. That autumn, on the first anniversary of the assassination, she wrote of JFK for Look magazine, "So now he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man. . . . At least he will never know whatever sadness might have lain ahead." Almost as a resolution to herself, she added, "He is free and we must live."

  After writing those words in longhand, Mrs. Kennedy never again mused in public about her husband—not in 1965, when Queen Elizabeth II dedicated a memorial acre to him at the birthplace of the Magna Carta; not in 1979, when she witnessed the opening of the Kennedy Library; not ever.4 When she and her children settled in New York, she asserted her right to be a private citizen and was content to allow the conversations in this book to be her principal contribution to the Kennedy historiography. In the spring of 1965, she read an early version of Arthur Schlesinger's forthcoming A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, and was upset to discover that the author had borrowed a number of items from their sealed conversations to describe the President's relationships with her and their children. She implored him by letter to remove "things I think are too personal. . . .The world has no right to his private life with me—I shared all those rooms with him—not with the Book of the Month readers + I don't want them snooping through those rooms now—even the bathtub—with the children." Schlesinger complied, and by the time A Thousand Days was published, their friendship was restored.

  Despite her insistence on privacy, Jacqueline Kennedy never forgot her obligation to posterity. She knew that when this oral history was published after her death, she would have what she expected to be the almost-final word on her life with her husband. It was another of her innovations. With the reminiscences in this book, Jacqueline Kennedy became the first American president's wife to submit to hours of intensive recorded questioning about her public and private life. Now, after decades in which her history has been left to others, listen to what she has to say.

  Jackie, when do you think the President first began to think and act seriously about the presidency? When did he begin to see himself, do you suppose, as a possible president?

  I think he was probably thinking about it for an awfully long time, long before I even knew, and I say this because I remember the first year we were married, I heard him at the Cape. He was in a room with his father, talking, and I came in and they were talking about something—about the vice presidency. Well, that was just the year after he had been elected a senator.

  This was 1953?

  Yeah. I said, "Were you talking about being vice president?" or something like that, and he sort of rather laughed. But I think it was always—he never stopped at any plateau, he was always going on to something higher. So, obviously after the vice presidential thing, well, then, he was definitely aiming for the presidency.1 But I think it would have been—I don't know—maybe when he first ran for the Senate. It was certainly before I knew him.

  JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, JR., JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, SR., AND JOHN F. KENNEDY ARRIVING IN SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND, JULY 1938

  John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

  I am sure it was always, in some sense, in his mind. Is the story true, as has sometimes been printed, that the ambassador originally thought of—expected Joe to be the great political figure of the family?2

  That's the sort of trite story that all these people who used to go interview Mr. Kennedy—you get so tired of people asking for anecdotes, and he'd always produce this thing that Joe would have. You know, how can I say? Because I never knew Joe. And, obviously, I suppose Joe would have run for politics, and then Jack, being so close to him, couldn't have run right on his heels in Massachusetts. Maybe he would have gone into something literary. But it's just not as simple as that story sounds. And then once Joe was dead, you know, Mr. Kennedy didn't do any strange thing of saying, "O.K., now we run you." Everything just evolved—they came back from the war—I don't know.

  The story sounded, to me, too pat and mechanical. Joe was a classmate of mine at Harvard, but—

  I've got a feeling, from what I think of Joe and everything, that he would have been so unimaginative, compared to Jack. He would never have—I think he probably would have gotten to be a senator, and not much higher. I don't know if that's prejudiced, but I don't think he had any of the sort of imagination that Jack did.

  Well, certainly I knew him moderately well, and he did not have the imagination or the intellectual force or intellectual interest. He was a most attractive, charming fellow and would have been, I think, very successful in politics, but I don't think he would ever have carried things to the point the President did. The vice presidency then was on his mind sort of sometime before 1956?

  Well, it's funny—they were talking about that in, I guess, around October–November 1953 at the Cape. But yet I know the night that Jack ran for the vice presidency in Chicago, he didn't want to then at all. And you know, it was just a last-minute thing when Stevenson threw the convention open, and, all that taught them so much of how to do things in California in 1960 because no one was prepared. And I remember being in that office and Bobby trying to get someone to paint signs.3 I mean, he wasn't trying for the vice presidency.

  ROBERT F. KENNEDY DURING JOHN F. KENNEDY'S SENATE CAMPAIGN, MASSACHUSETTS, 1952

  John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

  That was, when he came to Chicago in 1956, he was not coming, really, to—

  No. He didn't—he didn't want it. You know, he thought Stevenson would be defeated, and it would be because—and one of the reasons would be because he would have been a Catholic on the ticket with him, so it could only have been a hindrance to him. But then when all that thing got thrown wide open, I don't know who said, "Make a race for it," or what. It just really happened that night.

  There must have been some sense in his mind, because I remember Ted Sorensen coming—or perhaps, at least, in Ted's mind—coming to see me on the Cape that summer, before the convention, and discussing this—and I telling Ted that I was for it and that I knew other people in the Stevenson circle were for it. You remember then Ted had a memorandum prepared on the Catholic vote.4

  Ah, yes. That's right. I didn't realize it was then. The funny thing with Jack that would make it very hard in these interviews for me to sound as if I make sense, is that he never spoke of his sort of secret objectives, or of plotting things. Life with him was always so fast—of what you were doing that day. He always talked at home of what he was thinking about, or people. I mean, people say he never talked about politics at home with me, but that's all that was talked about. But he'd never sort of plot little goals and tell you when he was aiming for them then, and life with him was just so fast—that it isn't until you look back that you see what happened when.

  SENATOR JOHN F. KENNEDY AT THE 1956 DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION, CHICAGO

  John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

  With people, life is not like that, anyway. I don't think people have objectives which they sort of plot to reach. There are things organic in them which emerge as they continue living, and which are implanted and not sort of consciously striven for. When people do that, you get a kind of Nixon business,5 which is unattractive, and the President lived so intensely from day to day that the thing that was rather implicit in his career in both the shape of his consciousness and destiny, rather than, I imagine, explicit in his mind, or anything that he ever would talk about. You—when he decided to run for the vice presidency in 1956, what was it —just the occasion suddenly overpowered him, do you think? Or—

  I was out at the convention then with him in Chicago, but I was having a baby, and so I stayed with Eunice,6 and he lived in a hotel with Torb.7 And I saw him—you'd see him in the day at the convention, you'd have dinner, but it was such—I can't tell you the confusion—you sho
uld talk to Torb about that. You know, he was so tired and he was working all the time. And every day was different, so I think it was when— The worst fight in his life, which you should ask me about sometime, is when he got control of the Massachusetts legislature. That was to lead the Massachusetts delegation there, wasn't it?

  Yes, against Bill Burke.

  Yes, against "Onions" Burke.8 Because that was the only time in all of the fights he's been through in his life when I'd really seen him nervous when he couldn't talk about anything else before. So that was the big thing of all the spring, I guess was, you know, to win that fight. And it really was on his mind all the time. So, anyway, then he went out there as sort of an important person, and I guess he had rather an unsatisfactory couple of meetings with Stevenson, and suddenly there was that night. And I remember I stayed up all night at the headquarters, and Bobby came running to me and said, "We don't know anything. What do we do about Nevada?" And I was in a little corner doing something with envelopes or getting someone to make signs, and I timidly said, "I have an uncle who lives in Nevada." And nobody ever thought I had any political relatives or anything, but this uncle was a great friend of Pat McCarran.9 So we went in the little back room, Bobby and I, and called him up.