Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House

ONE

"Where's Jackie?" asked Jack Kennedy, looking around his Hyannis Port home the day after his election as President of the United States. A dozen family members were organizing themselves for the formal victory photograph, but his wife had disappeared. Wearing low-heeled shoes and a raincoat with a green knitted cowl collar to ward off the early November chill, Jackie had gone for a solitary walk on the beach. Kennedy headed out across the grassy dunes to retrieve her. When the couple finally arrived in his parents' living room, the family hailed them with a round of applause.

It was a moment that captured the contrasting personalities of the forty-three-year-old President-elect and his thirty-one-year-old wife. On election day, the Kennedy clan had gathered at the compound on the shore of Nantucket Sound, the family's nerve center for thirty-five years. Throughout the day and into the night, as the returns fluctuated between hopeful and nail-biting, Jackie had stayed away from the commotion, keeping track of the results from her cheery white and yellow living room, with its chintz sofas, hooked rugs, Staffordshire lamps, heaps of patterned pillows, and what Lady Bird Johnson called Jackie's "pixie things"--droll watercolors and sketches of family and friends in the style of her artistic mentor Ludwig Bemelmans. (Norman Mailer once patronizingly observed that a "fairly important young executive" in Cleveland might be expected to own such a room.)

Jack, however, had restlessly shuttled among the three Kennedy homes: the cozy three-bedroom cottage he shared with Jackie; the home of campaign manager Bobby across the lawn that was acommunications hub of news tickers and banks of telephones; and his father's seventeen-room white clapboard house with its wide veranda and commanding ocean views.

Besides his immediate family, Kennedy had sought information, reassurance, and amusement from the close aides and friends stationed in various places. The "Irish mafia"--Kenny O'Donnell, Larry O'Brien, and Dave Powers--along with Ted Sorensen, Kennedy's shadow for nearly four years of campaigning, shared the candidate's anxiety as he paced about, his ever-fidgety right hand tapping his teeth, or drumming tabletops. His childhood friend Lem Billings, a guest of Joe and Rose Kennedy, knew how to break the tension. Lem's mock weeping drew a wisecrack from JFK: "He's lost another state. His record is still minus one hundred percent. He's lost every county and every state of which he was supposed to be in charge."

The Washington artist Bill Walton had stayed over at JFK's house to keep Jackie company after a quiet dinner in their red-carpeted dining room. The closest to Jackie among JFK's intimates, Walton diverted her by talking about painting. When the returns looked promising at 10:30 p.m., Jackie turned to her husband, using her pet name for him, "Oh, Bunny, you're President now." "No," he replied. "It's too early yet."

Jackie went to bed before midnight; she was nearly eight months pregnant and dared not risk harming the baby by overextending herself. She had already lost two babies, one in 1954 after their first year of marriage. A daughter arrived stillborn in 1956, the result, Jackie's doctors said, of "the heat and crowds" at the Democratic convention in Chicago. She had borne another daughter, Caroline, in November 1957 after months of self-imposed rest and relaxation. Once again, she was taking no chances.

She had awakened when Jack turned in at 4 a.m., and he told her the outcome remained uncertain, but he was optimistic. As they both slept, Secret Service agents quietly infiltrated and secured the property. Seated on his bed in white pajamas at nine-thirty the next morning, Kennedy learned from Sorensen that he had won. He emerged after breakfast to stroll along the beach, accompanied by a swarm of siblings and friends. An hour later, as family members tossed a football around on the front lawn, it was Jackie's turn to walk, and she typically slipped out of the house alone, unnoticed by her husband.

That afternoon they stood together on the platform at the Hyannis armory--as beautiful a couple as had ever entered the presidency. At six feet and 165 pounds, he looked bronzed and vibrant, with broad shoulders and a trim waist. Like a TV anchorman, he had a big head--his hat size was an "unusually large" 7L. His thick chestnut hair (a source of vanity, pampered by secretaries who routinely administered scalp massages) was carefully combed, his heavy-lidded gray eyes cool and impenetrable. Kennedy's warmth and magnetism came entirely from his gleaming, high-wattage smile.

Jackie, on the other hand, telegraphed every emotion through her extraordinary eyes--large hazel orbs fringed with black lashes--so melting that a Cape Cod reporter once wrote that "it would be unendurable--indeed actually impossible--to write anything uncomplimentary about anyone with such eyes." Her face was square and unusually photogenic, framed by dark brown hair teased high in a style that gave her "the look of a beautiful lion." Her eyes, she once wrote, were set "unfortunately far apart," and she had full dark brows, porcelain skin, a slightly pudgy nose, and a supple mouth above a strong chin. In deference to her pregnancy, she wore a "bouffant purple coat." Ordinarily, at five foot seven, she had the slender figure of a mannequin.

In different ways, Jack and Jackie had been preparing for this moment for years. They had taught each other a great deal, held the same ambitions, and looked forward to recasting their respective roles in the White House. They were both bright, inquisitive, and bookish, with enviably retentive memories. Each had a quick, ironic wit that sprang from high intelligence. Jack's humor was more deadpan. Asked to explain how he became a war hero, he responded, "It was involuntary. They sank my boat." Jackie usually wore a mischievous glint, like "a very naughty eight-year-old," observed Norman Mailer, and drew on a highly developed sense of the ridiculous. When a hard-boiled reporter once asked her to translate the French phrase spelled out in gold letters on her belt, "Honi soit qui mal y pense" (Evil to him who evil thinks), she said, "It means, 'Love me, love my dog.'"

The new first couple shared the Catholic faith, and came of age in a similarly wealthy and rarefied world--she in Manhattan, Paris, Easthampton, Newport, and Washington; he in Bronxville, London, Palm Beach, Hyannis, and the French Riviera. Jackie had the additional gloss of high WASP society through her mother's second marriage to Hugh D. Auchincloss II, a stockbroker from a venerable family. Jack and Jackie could each boast extensive travels as well. Jack had spent time in the Middle East and Asia, and had summered in Europe nearly every year since his adolescence. By her twenty-fourth birthday, Jackie had made five European trips. They had comparable academic bona fides as well: Choate and Harvard, Miss Porter's and Vassar. "The coat of arms for this Administration," quipped Jackie, "should be a daisy chain on a field of crimson."

She had broken an engagement to John Husted, a New York stockbroker with a proper social pedigree, after she began seeing Jack Kennedy. "All I ask is someone with a little imagination, but they are hard to find," she had told her sister, Lee, a year before her first evening with JFK. "It is having an open mind that counts." Their Newport wedding in September 1953 was a political and social extravaganza with 1,400 guests. But the marriage had nearly fractured in its first few years, as Jackie endured the political wife's persistent loneliness, aggravated by what Lem Billings described to Doris Kearns Goodwin, the authorized Kennedy family biographer, as the "humiliation she would suffer when she found herself stranded at parties while Jack would suddenly disappear with some pretty young girl."

When their relationship hit bottom in 1956, Jackie sat for a filmed interview in which she revealed her wounds. "You're pretty much in love with him, aren't you?" asked the interviewer in one of the outtakes. Jackie squinted, averted her eyes, laughed, and said, "Oh no." Returning her gaze to the interlocutor, she pondered and added, "I said, 'no,' didn't I?" In a retake she was asked the same question, only to reply, "I suppose so," adding, "I've ruined [the interview], haven't I?"

Jack was initially thrown by such moodiness, which "really drove him out of his mind," said Billings, and by Jackie's undisguised distaste for politics. Now, after seven years of marriage, they had come to understand each other's strengths and frailties with sophisticated objectivity. "She breathes all the political gases that flow around us, but she never seems to inhale them," JFK once said of Jackie. She kept that cheeky detachment, ultimately turning it to his advantage with her shrewd assessments and wry observations. She learned to devote herself to his interests but guarded her own strong character, refusing to be what she called "a vegetable wife...sort of humdrum [and] uninteresting."

Jack Kennedy responded to Jackie's cleverness, along with her passion for history, and her interests in what he called "things of the spirit--art, literature and the like." Comparing her to his sisters--"direct, energetic types"--he came to appreciate that Jackie was "more sensitive. You might even call her fey. She's a more indirect sort." Jackie adored his self-deprecation and his "curious inquiring mind that is always at work. If I were drawing him, I would draw a tiny body and an enormous head." She said she was "fascinated by the way he thinks. He summons every point to further his argument." In his political life, she admired his "imperturbable self-confidence and sureness of his powers."

Those who saw them privately sensed a deep connection when they "exchanged eyes," as Dave Powers described it. "Jackie was the only woman I saw him show affection to," said Vivian Crespi, a longtime friend of both. During the campaign a reporter from Louisiana named Iris Turner Kelso was "mesmerized" when she happened to witness Jack greeting Jackie with "a long kiss." "We loved them in every way that a woman loved a man," Jackie would write to Governor John Connally's wife, Nellie, after JFK was assassinated. "Our husbands loved us and were proud of us." Yet the intimate life of Jack and Jackie Kennedy puzzled even those closest to them. JFK's persistent womanizing was a mystifying trait, given the beauty, brains, and luminous style of his wife. It may have been that her capacity for love was greater than his, that "Jack's love had certain reservations but hers was total," in the view of Robin Chandler Duke, who knew him for nearly two decades.

Their manner together often seemed formal, mostly because each had been raised with the upper-class, boarding-school taboo against public displays of affection. "I would describe Jack as rather like me in that his life is an iceberg," Jackie would write to journalist Fletcher Knebel shortly after the election. "The public life is above water--& the private life--is submerged--I flatter myself that I have made his private life something he can love & find peace in--comfortable smoothly run houses--with all the things he loves in them--pictures, books, good food, friends--& his daughter & wife geared to adapt to his hours when he comes home." For Jackie in particular, life in the White House held the promise of a new togetherness, with the incessant years of campaigning behind them.

Looking pale, her chin raised slightly, Jackie watched her husband intently while he read his acceptance speech, holding sheaves of congratulatory telegrams with trembling hands. "My wife and I prepare for a new Administration and a new baby," he concluded, coaxing a slight smile from Jackie. "Hard-hearted Jack with tears in his eyes and his voice," journalist Mary McGrory reported to Teddy White, "the very first time I have seen the slightest display of emotion in the candidate and his team."

Flanking Jack and Jackie on the crowded platform were his parents, two brothers, and three sisters--"all made out of the same clay," the British aristocrat Diana Cooper once observed, "hair and teeth and tongues from the same reserves"--along with their handsome spouses. The eldest brother, Joe Jr., and a sister, Kathleen, both long dead, were ghosts of youthful promise in the family tableau. Absent, as always, was JFK's forty-two-year-old mentally retarded sister, Rosemary, who had been cared for by nuns since a failed lobotomy arranged nearly two decades earlier by her father. Joe Kennedy had intended to curb her aggressive behavior, but instead she was reduced to infantile incoherence. Rosemary's fate was known only within the family; for public consumption, she was a "childhood victim of spinal meningitis," an affliction, Joe Kennedy baldly asserted to Time magazine, that was "best to bring...out in the open."

Joseph Patrick Kennedy, the seventy-two-year-old family patriarch known by all as "the Ambassador," had himself come out in the open at the Armory. Almost twenty years earlier to the day, in November 1940, Joe had fled public life in disgrace after Franklin D. Roosevelt forced him out as the American envoy to Britain for advocating conciliation with the Nazis. As the mastermind of his son's political career--three terms in Congress, twice elected to the Senate--Joe had stayed behind the scenes, declining even to appear when Jack won the Democratic nomination the previous July. But this time Jack Kennedy overruled his domineering father, delaying the family's public appearance until the Ambassador joined them. On the platform, Joe Kennedy looked "grim and pale," and he balked when JFK tried to nudge him into TV camera range, an "awkward moment," observed Teddy White. The hesitancy belied Joe Kennedy's elation over his son's election. It had taken many years of hard work and iron determination, along with substantial infusions of money, to make Jack the first Irish Catholic president. His election was not only a triumph for the son, but also a personal vindication for the father.