Grace and Power
At the dawn of the 1960s, a 43-year-old president and his 31-year-old first lady - the youngest couple ever to occupy the White House - captivated the world with their easy elegance and cool conviction that anything was possible. Theirs was an era of Grace and Power.
By Sally Bedell Smith '70
THE KENNEDYS MAY HAVE BEEN DEMOCRATS, full of compassion for the poor and dispossessed, but the image of Jack and Jackie as the king and queen surrounded by their court had occurred to many people familiar with the administration. The British political philosopher and formidable Oxford don Isaiah Berlin - a guest at several private White House dinners - saw the Kennedys as "Bonapartist," finding parallels in Napoleon's brothers who, like Robert F. Kennedy as attorney general and Edward M. Kennedy as U.S. senator, held responsible positions in the government. Berlin found further similarities in the aides who served their leader: "devoted, dedicated marshals who liked nothing better than to have their ears tweaked." Kennedy's "men with shining eyes," Berlin observed, had a "great deal of energy and ambition" and were "marching forward in some very exciting and romantical fashion." David Ormsby Gore, the British ambassador during the Kennedy administration and one of the President's most intimate friends and advisers, likened the administration to a "Tudor Court."
Richard Neustadt, then a professor of government at Columbia University, mused that the Kennedy "court life," a cynosural arrangement last seen in the White House of Theodore Roosevelt, had the equivalent of "apartments at Versailles" and "latch keys for the weekends." The columnist Stewart Alsop complained after one year of the Kennedy administration, "The place is lousy with courtiers and ladies in waiting - actual or would be." As with court life in earlier centuries, the Kennedy entourage made a stately progress: from the White House to expensive homes in the Virginia hunt country, to Palm Beach, Hyannis Port, and Newport - all playgrounds for the rich and privileged.
"Jackie wanted to do Versailles in America," said Oleg Cassini, her official dress designer and self-described "de facto courtier close to the king and queen." "She said this many times," Cassini added. "She had realized some very smart women encouraged a court throughout history." In particular Jackie admired Madame de Maintenon, who presided over a legendary salon before marrying Louis XIV, and Madame de Récamier, the early nineteenth-century hostess famous for the wit and intelligence of her gatherings. Jackie organized her life in the White House according to what interested her, handing off many of the ritual obligations to others and delegating the paperwork to subordinates. "My life here which I dreaded & which at first overwhelmed me - is now under control and the happiest time I have ever known - not for the position - but for the closeness of one's family," Jackie wrote to her friend William Walton in mid-1962. "The last thing I expected to find in the W. House."
BECAUSE OF THEIR YOUTH, BEAUTY, AND SOCIAL PEDIGREE, along with their pursuit of fun and intellectual stimulation, Jack and Jackie Kennedy attracted a glamorous coterie of friends and colleagues - what Harold Macmillan characterized as the "smart life" (international socialites and Hollywood stars), "the highbrow life" (pundits and professors), and the "political life" (chosen aides and cabinet officers). Perhaps as never before, Washington was sharply divided between the "ins" and the "outs." Washington society columnist Betty Beal, who observed from outside the circle, commented that Washingtonians invited to private parties at the Kennedy White House "adopted a comical air of smugness." Within the court, "very few really had much in common with each other," said newspaperman Charles Bartlett, a Kennedy intimate. Some were accomplished athletes, others hopelessly uncoordinated. The socially prominent carried equal weight with those from modest backgrounds; neither Jack nor Jackie could be accused of snobbery.
Only two personal friends of the first Catholic president shared his religion, along with three of his close aides. A remarkable number in the inner circle - five personal friends and three members of the administration - were Republicans, not to mention Jackie Kennedy's entire family, including her half sister Nina Steers, who wrote anti-Kennedy articles for a Tennessee newspaper during the 1960 campaign.
Several Kennedy insiders were thought to be homosexual, although only one, the columnist Joseph Alsop, ever acknowledged it. Despite the macho image of the Kennedy administration, JFK was comfortable with homosexuals, perhaps, some friends believed, because he understood the tensions of having a secret life. Most members of the Kennedy court were stars in their fields, lending what Kennedy biographer William Manchester called "an elegant, mandarin tone." They tended to be "cheerful, amusing, energetic, informed and informal," observed Kennedy's chief domestic aide Theodore Sorensen. Nearly everyone in the Kennedy court was attractive - and even those of lesser looks, such as the pockmarked artist William Walton, were clever and debonair.
Brainpower and a talent to amuse were the most highly valued traits. JFK "enjoyed...almost anyone from whom he could learn ...communicating on the level of the Bundy brothers and the Cassini brothers," wrote Sorensen. Both Jack and Jackie abhorred the mundane. JFK said he "hated the suburbia-type existence" with its endless cocktail parties. Even as a teenager Jackie had confided to her sister a distaste for country club women who could converse only about monograms on guest towels and the progress of their children's teeth.
JFK expected "real ping pong in the communication," in the words of White House aide Fred Holborn. Katharine Graham, then the mousy wife of the Washington Post's glamorous president and publisher, confessed that her "terror" of boring JFK "paralyzed and silenced" her. When Suzanne Roosevelt, the wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., hosted Jack and Jackie for dinner, she caught the President's attention by quoting Lincoln. "My God, I said something that interested him," she recalled thinking at the time.
Kennedy "hated dimness," said Isaiah Berlin. "Anybody who was dim, no matter how virtuous, how wise, how...noble...[was] no good to him." Nor was anyone with less than one hundred percent loyalty. "The Kennedys were pretty tough eggs," said Marian Schlesinger. "Either you were in or you were out.... I think the Kennedys really turned people into courtiers....They manipulated and used people in a rough way."
Jack and Jackie Kennedy would quite literally command their courtiers to sing and dance. Paul "Red" Fay, who became friendly with JFK during World War II, routinely performed "Hooray for Hollywood," yelling out the lines as JFK doubled over with laughter. Oleg Cassini would launch into his "Chaplin walk" or the latest dance step from New York nightclubs. "Kennedy knew he was a potentate, and at a dinner for 150 he would point a finger at you and say, 'Talk,'" said Cassini. "Was I a performing seal? Yes, and it was a slightly naughty thing. He did it to a lot of people. In Palm Beach after a heavy lunch he told everyone to do pushups and everyone did, trying to impress him."
IT SEEMED TO MANY AROUND THEM that Jack and Jackie Kennedy were remarkably self-contained, with the result that no friend felt indispensable. Jack Kennedy "gave a great impression of affection and congeniality but he had immense reserve," an element of mystery that was "a source of his fascination and power," according to Arthur Schlesinger. Jackie, too, was "unto herself," said Tish Baldrige, Jackie's White House social secretary. "She was self-sufficient." In Schlesinger's view, "Jack Kennedy enjoyed his friends and Bobby Kennedy needed his friends. Jack didn't dislike people, it's just that he didn't need them."
Schlesinger's view may have been affected by his tangential position at the White House. "I doubt life would have been any different for [JFK] if I had not gone to Washington," he said. "I don't think I had much influence over Jack Kennedy. He liked talking to me." Others, including Sorensen, did have significant day-to-day influence - and knew it. In his role as speechwriter, "I was writing some things I hoped he would share," Sorensen said. "I had the opportunity to have some voice" in shaping Kennedy's views.
Both Jack and Jackie depended on the people close to them - for ideas, for approval, for help, for inspiration. Whether in dealing with the Soviet Union or choosing a fabric for the walls of the Blue Room, the President and First Lady constantly drew on the knowledge of trusted friends and associates, though far less so when it came to emotional matters. Their true intimates were family members, but even in a tightly bound clan, some were more inside than others. Most of their friendships were defined by strong bonds at crucial formative moments - for JFK in school, the navy, and political life, and for the much-younger Jackie in her childhood and school years. But there were newer connections as well, reflecting more recent social, intellectual, temperamental, and political needs.
Jack Kennedy subscribed to the "great man" theory of history, and the White House that he and Jackie presided over was a microcosm of that concept, filled with lively, smart, strikingly young, and strong-willed individuals who pushed ideas and policies, rather than being swept along by them. The Kennedys and their circle set out ambitiously, almost grandiosely, to create an America in their own image and according to their own tastes. To a remarkable degree they succeeded, leaving behind a more assertive nation, infused with a vision and an aesthetic that found its inspiration in Jeffersonian ideals. In the process, they cast aside the bland exertions of the 1950s, and set America on a higher path that combined the sophistication of the Old World and the vitality and power of the New. They were special people who intersected at a special time, a time when nothing seemed impossible.
Excerpted from Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House with the permission of Random House, Inc.
Copyright (c) 2004.
