Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (29 page)

“ ‘But the poor dear committed suicide, haven’t you heard?’ the person said, continuing on about Marilyn. ‘They found her dead, lying nude in her bed.’ At that, Jackie sud- denly turned and snapped, ‘Isn’t it tragic enough without all of us sitting here under a full moon and gossiping about it?’ When she said that, everyone stopped and stared at her, stunned.”

Jackie got up from her chair and walked to the other side of the yacht. There, with a faint smile, she watched as a cou- ple of mandolin players and an Italian singer performed “O Sole Mio.”

The next day, the same party and some other friends of Lee’s and Jackie’s went to a nightclub in Ravello called Number Two. Wearing green Capri pants and a matching blouse, Jackie had to be coaxed by Lee to dance the cha- cha with Count Silvio Medici del Vascello. “She did not

want to dance,” said one reporter who sneaked into the nightclub. “She was in a dour mood. Something was both- ering her. Lee Radziwill was going around to everyone and apologizing for her sister, saying she was under the weather.”

The next morning, Sunday, Jackie attended Mass at the local Catholic church. When she got there, she discovered that the pastor, Father Francesco Camera, expected her to sit on an ornate, sixteenth-century
prie-dieu
with red vel- vet pillows. Because this seat was usually reserved for the visiting Bishop of Amalfi, Jackie felt uncomfortable about using it and instead sat in one of the wooden pews, next to Mayor Mansi. Later, the Mayor would recall overhearing Jackie say to Caroline in Italian, which she spoke well, “
Caroline, preghiamo per papa
.” (“Caroline, let us pray for father.”)

P A R T F O U R

The Kennedy Women Do Men’s Work

I
n the Kennedy world, politics was a man’s game—or at least that’s what the men liked to think. It did not appear that they had much tolerance for their wives’ opinions. “[Jack] Kennedy could not be swayed by any woman,” said Myer Feldman, who was Deputy Special Counsel to JFK. “He might be called a chauvinist today. He did not think most women were his equal.”

In fact, though, the wives were not just silent partners. They did have opinions, and they did make them known—whether their husbands were interested or not. Going all the way back to Rose and her relationship with Joe in the 1930s and ’40s, Kennedy wives often influenced the course of events.

Rose, who had a fine ear for politics and a keen sense of the right thing to do, was in her glory when Joe was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James. His position was a huge honor, especially for an Irish Catholic, and the Kennedys were generally approved of in England. They were a breath of fresh air, and the children— especially the older girls, who were popular with London society—made a favorable impression.

Sometimes Joe’s democratic ways of doing things were well received, but just as often they were not. Joe had be- come known for his unusual habits, acting in a less than dis- tinguished—and less than British—manner by greeting people with his feet on his desk, chewing gum, swearing and losing his temper. While Rose was charmingly behaved, Joseph was often crass and undignified. He believed that the British were weak and could not be depended upon in a mil- itary conflict, and he made many enemies as a result of his outspokenness.

Even worse was Joe’s growing isolationism on the eve of World War II. Rose tried to get him to tone it down because FDR was about to be reelected and he needed the country behind him if he was going to send help to Great Britain. However, Joe was loud in his opposition to the President he supposedly served. When he went to Washington, he chewed out Roosevelt as though the President were an un- derling. Furious with him for his insolence, and confused by Joseph’s seeming support of some of Hitler’s actions (“I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would want to go to war to save the Czechs,” he said when Hitler threat- ened to invade Czechoslovakia), Roosevelt saw to it that Kennedy resigned and he made sure his political career was at an end.

Rose was extremely upset. Yet if she had tried to talk to Joseph about any of it, he wouldn’t have listened. He and his sons had always been a stubborn bunch and, like a lot of men of their time, they had to be pushed into thinking of women as more than just the mothers of their children. It was especially ironic, then, that private poll soundings by the Kennedys always indicated that more women than men favored the family and its politics.

In 1946, when Jack ran for the House of Representatives in his first campaign, Rose and Eunice hosted a successful reception for 1,500—mostly women—at the Hotel Com- mander in Cambridge. It had been anticipated that Kennedy’s primary opponent, Mike Neville, would take Cambridge by a landslide, but in the end he barely won. Neville would later cite the Kennedy women’s luncheon as “the clincher” that made it such a close race. In the end, Jack would defeat a field of ten in the primaries and go on to an overwhelming victory in November over his Republican op- ponent, Lester Brown.

Five years later, in 1951, one of the factors that con- tributed to John Kennedy’s surviving the Republican land- slide that swept Dwight D. Eisenhower into the Presidency was Rose’s involvement in the campaign. The family patri- arch was completely perplexed when political strategists suggested that the Kennedy women—Rose in particular— be recruited to campaign. When John Powers, leader of Boston’s Democratic drive, wanted Rose to speak at a series of rallies for her son, Joseph roared, “But why? She’s a grandmother, for heaven’s sake.”

“She’s also a Gold Star mother,” John Powers said, “the mother of a congressman and a war hero, the beautiful wife of Joseph P. Kennedy and the daughter of John F. Fitzger- ald—which means she’s hot stuff in Boston. I need her and I’ve got to have her.”

Rose loved campaigning and, as the daughter of a leg- endary mayor of Boston, knew exactly what she was doing when she was on the trail. She became a valuable asset to Jack’s senatorial campaign of ’51. On a typically busy day, she would change her clothes in the back seat of a car— wearing a glamorous gown and expensive jewels to give one

speech to a formal gathering, then a simple skirt and blouse at another function at a union hall. Dave Powers recalls, “She wowed them everywhere.”

Rose, Eunice, Jean, Pat, and Ethel—who was the only Kennedy wife at the time—appeared all over the state dur- ing the senatorial campaign, at women’s clubs, street-corner rallies, and on front door steps after ringing doorbells. It was once calculated that more than 75,000 women attended cof- fee and tea parties hosted by the Kennedy women during that campaign. In the end, Kennedy ended up beating his op- ponent, the incumbent Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., by 70,737 votes.

Jackie’s participation in the family’s politics can be traced back to the Democratic Convention of 1956, in Chicago. As expected, most of the Kennedy women found a way to participate, except for Pat, who was eight months pregnant, and Rose, who was on vacation with Joseph in France. Jackie, expecting her own child in about a month, probably shouldn’t have gone either, since she’d al- ready suffered one miscarriage. However, as the dutiful wife, she didn’t want to miss so important a moment in Jack’s life. Besides, Ethel was nearly eight months along herself, and she wasn’t letting that stop her from partici- pating.

So, even though her doctors strongly suggested that she stay behind lest she jeopardize her health or the baby’s, Jackie was adamant that she be in Chicago to campaign with her husband. Adlai Stevenson was the likely Democratic candidate for president but the vice presidential spot was an open field, and the notion of a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket seemed a distinct possibility.

For his part, Jack also wanted his wife in Chicago, but not

because he needed her emotional support so much as be- cause he needed her for purposes of public relations. The di- vorced Stevenson would need a married running mate, and Jackie was the perfect, poster-board wife—not only mar- ried, but pregnant. She was also attractive, and since the convention was to be televised, Jack figured that once America got an eyeful of Jackie, he’d have a strong asset in her.

In the end, though Jack Kennedy came close, he fell just sixty-eight votes short of victory, losing to Tennessee Sena- tor Estes Kefauver. Jackie, feeling overwrought and emo- tional from the entire week, was unable to hold back her tears. “So close,” she said, absentmindedly fingering her pearl necklace, “so, so close.”

Though he appeared gracious and humble publicly, Jack was bitterly disappointed by his loss and would express a strong private dislike for Stevenson the rest of his life. The problem was that, instead of just selecting his own running mate as had been expected, Stevenson had left the nomina- tion to the floor in a mad race among the leading candidates: Kennedy, Estes Kefauver, Hubert Humphrey, and Albert Gore, Jr.

Jackie stood at her husband’s side as he confidently ad- dressed the surging crowd. Even in defeat, he looked like a winner, so handsome, charismatic, and powerful.

Unfortunately, the baby girl Jackie was carrying would be stillborn shortly after the convention. Doctors told her that the stress of the political function may have affected the pregnancy.

Jackie Kennedy wasn’t a political person by nature; prior to meeting Jack she had never even voted. But once

she became Jack’s wife, she wanted to know more and to become more involved. She loved to travel and she took many trips abroad while in the White House, as both sightseer and presidential emissary: five weeks in India and Pakistan, a month in Italy, time in Greece and Paris. Everywhere she went, she was greeted with great enthusi- asm.

“I wasn’t very interested in politics before I married Jack,” she once noted, “but I’m learning by osmosis. People say I don’t know anything about politics, but you learn an enormous amount just being around politicians.”

“She was intensely interested in all of the political suc- cesses of her husband’s career,” recalls Letitia Baldrige. And here lies the great failure in projecting her real image to the American public, which thought of her as a wonderful wife and mother, which she was, and a beautiful, poised woman of artistic talent, which she also was. But people also saw her as someone who hated politics and hated politicians. In actual fact, although she didn’t like events like political con- ventions and meetings, she was a bright, intelligent person and was interested in the issues.

“All of the Kennedy wives were, in fact. They very defi- nitely shared their opinions with their husbands and interro- gated them as to what was going on. They were abreast and helpful,” adds Baldrige.

While what Letitia says is no doubt true, it wasn’t al- ways obvious. One of Jack’s speechwriters, Ted Sorenson, says, “Offhand, I don’t recall hearing about her being his political sounding board. In a meeting, or even to me in private, he never said, ‘I was discussing this with Jackie and it occurred to her that we should do this,’ or, ‘in her opinion, so and so is unreliable.’ However, their personal

relationship was totally private and kept very private. She could have played such a role without anyone knowing about it.”

“Jackie was intensely interested in foreign affairs in par- ticular, and would often write letters to heads of states, friendly, social, chatty letters when she felt she needed to,” Baldrige continues. “Of course, we didn’t have carbon copies of what she had written and didn’t know what she was saying to these people. She would write for pages and pages to General de Gaulle and Prime Minister Nehru. She could have been setting policy for all we knew!

“This was all the result of her working with Jack up- stairs [in their private quarters] and seeing how she could help, in her way, to further America’s political gains and foreign policies. I am sure no other First Lady has ever done that, and no other President has dared let his wife have so much latitude. I hope that history will one day un- earth those letters. She was intensely interested in foreign affairs.”

Also, said Baldrige, “Jackie had a fantastic desire for his- torical knowledge, and she was a sponge once she learned it. She caught every nuance. And she wanted to know Ameri- can history not just for herself, but for her husband. They were almost competitive in the knowledge they consumed, very much like Henry and Clare Luce in trying to one-up the other on historical facts and so forth, and I think on many points—well, he almost acquiesced that she knew more about history than he did.”

According to Kennedy intimate Chuck Spalding, Ethel was also “terribly interested in history and politics, really passionately interested in it. With politics, she had an ad- vantage right from the start over Jackie, because she didn’t

value her privacy as much as Jackie. Jackie was bigger on writing letters, traveling, and doing her work that way, she wasn’t that interested in dignitaries coming to the White House. Ethel had a tremendous enthusiasm for gov- ernmental people and for everything they were doing, but above all for everything that her husband was doing and how it related to him. That was a tremendous asset to Bobby.