First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies (14 page)

Salinger had a good relationship with the First Lady and knew that he would have to patiently wait to get her blessing for access to the children. He gently brought up a request from
Look
magazine once a month for six months, but each time the First Lady resisted. President Kennedy told Salinger, “Now, you tell
Look
magazine that I’ll reconsider it. . . . Why don’t you ask me the next time Mrs. Kennedy goes out of town?” Not long after that, Jackie took Caroline on a trip and the President saw his opportunity. He stuck his head into the press office. “Is there a
Look
photographer around?” Within ten minutes, photographer Stanley Tretick was there and got the iconic shots of John-John poking his head out from under the President’s desk in the Oval Office. Kennedy said he would take the blame when his wife came back, and when she did “all hell broke loose,” recalled Camp. Jackie told the President, “You tell
Look
magazine to never publish a picture.” She knew exactly what had happened. Laura Bergquist Knebel, the reporter who was assigned to write the accompanying story for
Look
, said that when Jackie found out she came to her and said, “Stan and Jack were like two sneaky little boys. The minute I left town, they would let you in to do these things that I didn’t particularly want done.” Jackie had the final word on the matter and the photos were held back until after Kennedy’s assassination, when she had
a change of heart. The photos became a bittersweet glimpse at this loving father-and-son relationship and ran in the magazine’s Father’s Day issue.

Caroline was better able to understand that her father was gone than her little brother. “For a while there it was very rough. She just looked ghastly. She looked so pale and her concentration . . .” Caroline’s teacher Jacqueline Hirsh remembered in an interview for the JFK library, her voice trailing off at the thought of those terrible months. The first time Hirsh took her out after the assassination, photographers hounded them. “Hi, Caroline!” they shouted. Caroline hid in the backseat of the car and asked Hirsh, “Please tell me when nobody’s looking.” Jackie’s and Caroline’s red-rimmed eyes were the only signs to those around them that they were reeling from the enormous loss.

Jackie Kennedy sought counseling from the Reverend Richard McSorley, a Jesuit priest who taught at Georgetown University. On the morning of JFK’s state funeral he received a call from Jackie asking him to come and talk with her. A few weeks later, Jackie asked him if he would give her tennis lessons. McSorley had won tennis tournaments in seminary, but he knew from the start that there was more to her request than just tennis—she was seeking spiritual guidance and not help with her backhand. The two met at noon every day at Robert Kennedy’s estate, Hickory Hill in McLean, Virginia. Jackie was such a seasoned tennis player that there was no point in even keeping score as they played. Instead she asked him existential questions and whether God knew what was going to happen to her husband, and if he did, why he would take her son Patrick from her just weeks before. Jackie asked McSorley penetrating questions about life and death and the Resurrection and he would go back to his office at Georgetown and consult different texts and theologians and report back the next time they met.

In late 2000, writer Thomas Maier interviewed McSorley for a book about the Kennedys’ Irish Catholic heritage. He asked the priest, who died in 2002, whether Caroline and John-John had ever wanted to know why, “if there’s a loving God, why . . . this could happen to somebody like the President?” McSorley replied, “The children never asked me. Jackie Kennedy asked me.” According to Maier, Jackie confided in McSorley that she was so distraught that she had even contemplated suicide. The two were so close that members of the extended Kennedy clan asked McSorley to urge her to move her family to New York when they saw how unhappy she was in Georgetown, where she couldn’t escape from the tragedy of what had happened. After she moved her two young children to New York she asked him to visit them, and over time McSorley became a strong male presence in John Jr.’s life. The two took strolls in Central Park with a Secret Service agent trailing not far behind.

The depth of the Kennedy children’s loss was too much to bear at times, even for the priest who had seen so much suffering. McSorley recalled that one night after dinner with Jackie and her children, Jackie told her son, “You get ready for bed, and maybe Father will come in to say good night.” A few minutes later the priest walked into John-John’s bedroom as Jackie stood in the doorway. Jackie asked him in a soft voice, “Do you know ‘Danny Boy’? His father used to sing it to him just before he went to sleep. He used ‘Johnny’ instead of ‘Danny.’” McSorley dutifully sang as the young boy stared up at him in rapt attention. “Jackie stood silently in the doorway looking at us,” he said. “I was in tears as I left the room.” After he left, Jackie walked over to her son’s bedside, said a prayer with him, and gave him a kiss good night.

Jackie told McSorley that she hoped her move to New York would help her stop “brooding.” Ultimately, it was her children who saved
her. “If you want to know what my religious convictions are now,” she wrote to McSorley after the move, “they are: to keep busy and to keep healthy so that you can do all you should for your children. And to get to bed very early at night so you don’t have time to think.”

S
OME OF THE
first ladies struggled with motherhood and were honest about the isolation that sometimes comes during the first few months with a baby at home. Almost every afternoon, Lady Bird Johnson escaped to the small blue sitting room overlooking the Rose Garden that had been Jackie Kennedy’s dressing room and Eleanor Roosevelt’s bedroom in previous incarnations. She dutifully taped a note to the door: “Mrs. J at work!” Here she sat on a blue velvet sofa and recorded the day’s events into her tape recorder. She locked the tapes away, and the only person to hear them (until her secretary transcribed them a month before she left the White House) was Chief Justice Earl Warren. He requested her recording from November 22, 1963, for the commission investigating President Kennedy’s assassination. Her diligent effort produced a comprehensive diary offering insight into day-to-day life in the White House.

In her diary, she recalled feeling panicked when, as the wife of a congressman, she was alone with baby Lynda Bird: “I give myself small plaudits for knowing how to handle children,” she said. “I remember the absolute horror I felt on the day when it was finally this lady’s [Lynda Bird’s nanny’s] day off and I saw her disappearing down the street growing smaller and smaller in the distance. And there was that squirming red infant in that bassinet that I was totally responsible for.” A congressman’s wife, she jumped at an invitation to christen a submarine in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “It was a marvelous break from a vigorous
four- or five-month-old little girl,” she later recalled, with no hint of shame or regret. “It was the big outside world, and for once I was sort of the center of attention. I must say I enjoyed it.” While her husband was back in his Texas district, Lady Bird stayed in Washington with her daughter and wrote to him: “Lynda is too active for my peace of mind, and she fell off the bed today.” Years later, in a
Good Housekeeping
interview that she did with Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter, Lady Bird was asked whether a woman’s greatest influence is as a mother, especially a mother of sons. She sidestepped the question and replied, “It’s a big plus that men have come to share in the lives of their children, in such necessary things as feeding them, changing their diapers, tending to them when they’re sick.” Once men began seeing the workload of motherhood, they would have greater respect for what women have been doing for centuries, she said.

After their father had decided not to seek reelection, Lynda and Luci Johnson were clearly upset during the pre-inaugural coffee with the Nixons in the Red Room. Their father seemed heartbroken. The sound of Vietnam protesters chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” across the street in Lafayette Square had grown louder and louder over the years. Butler George Hannie once heard Johnson discussing Vietnam with aide Joe Califano. “Our kids are dying over there,” he said. “We have to do something.”

Nash Castro worked for the National Park Service and had collaborated with Lady Bird on her beautification project. Castro says that he and Lady Bird would often meet in the West Sitting Hall for working lunches and the First Lady would “wrestle up” hamburgers for them. But on at least one occasion the chants from the protesters across the street were too loud for them to carry on a conversation, so they moved to the Queens’ Bedroom. But
even there they could hear the angry voices. “Let’s not hear any more of that,” she said. “Let’s move somewhere else.” Finally, they ended up finishing their work in the Lincoln Bedroom. Chief Usher J. B. West recalls hearing Lady Bird whistling to herself as she walked along the deep, wide hallways of the mansion. She learned to build a cocoon of calm around herself over the years, one that made life with Lyndon and life in the White House more tolerable. “She had an escape valve,” West says, “some secret little room inside her mind that she could adjourn to when things got tense.”

Castro remembered the day before Johnson announced that he wouldn’t be running for a second term as president. He was taking a quiet drive with Lady Bird, who had adopted beautification as her signature program, to see magnolia trees in a park near the White House. She spotted a patch of barren land and asked, “Nash, when are we going to beautify this rectangle?” “Well before your second term ends, Mrs. Johnson.” She stared and stared at her good friend for so long that he started to get embarrassed. “We’ll see,” she said finally, knowing that she could not reveal a secret only she and a close circle of family knew: there would be no second term. After her husband’s announcement, she was sitting in the backseat of a car with their social secretary, Bess Abell, as they were being driven out of the White House’s Northwest Gate just as the sun was setting. “Oh, Mrs. Johnson, are you going to miss all this?” Abell asked her. Lady Bird replied, “Yes, like a front tooth. But there’s nothing in the world that would make me pay the price of another ticket of admission.”

Unlike the Ford children, who were secretly happy that their father lost because they believed the strain of a second term shortens presidents’ lives, the Johnson daughters knew it would be hard for their father to live a more private life. Luci and Lynda wept
during Nixon’s inauguration at the Capitol and had to leave to go to the restroom to cry privately. President Johnson retired to the Texas White House and lived only four more years, until he died of a heart attack in 1973 at age sixty-four.

W
ATCHING YOUR CHILDREN
suffer for choices you and your husband made is extraordinarily painful. The Nixons were a very close family. “The women’s libbers are not going to like what I’m going to say now, they’re not going to like it at all,” President Nixon said, long after his resignation. “Her [Pat Nixon’s] greatest legacy are her children. She’s been a magnificent mother. . . . Patricia and Julie are remarkable young ladies. I was away a lot and she certainly gets the credit for that.” The Nixons developed a sort of bunker mentality, hunkering down during Watergate and the Vietnam War protests. Julie and Tricia Nixon worshipped their father. Once, Tricia called the White House in the evening to say that she was in the middle of a political argument with someone and she needed to talk to her father to get the facts. “Dick was out swimming,” Pat recalled. “The poor man got out of the pool and took the phone to answer her questions. Tricia called back later to say, ‘I won. Thanks a lot.’” Pat said the President was happy for the call for two reasons: she thanked him, she wanted the facts, and she wanted to win. “That’s three reasons, I guess.”

Tricia Nixon learned quickly how constraining life in the White House would be when, on the night of her father’s first inauguration, the twenty-two-year-old went to the family’s quarters on the second floor after the inaugural parade and put her hand on the doorknob of her new room and heard a voice: “Do not try to open the doors. They are locked.” A Secret Service agent emerged from the shadows and opened the door for her.