Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy (29 page)

Yes, yes.

Well, we got sort of, to be a little bit friends in Newport, and then the helicopter and the plane. And you know, he always takes your arm. He was sort of sweet to me and they did bring the most touching, thoughtful presents for the children and—little boxes, little costumes, nothing very fabulous. So they'd obviously cared about the trip and had this chip on their shoulder, I don't know. We tried to be so nice to them. And then the next night there was a big dinner at the Indian embassy and again I sat next to Nehru. I found him very easy and charming, you know, and he seemed to so like to have someone make a—you know, I always felt that he liked me. But I just think it was really sticky going in the conferences.

What did the President—did the President say anything afterwards? Was he disappointed in Nehru?

I think he was. I think the meetings got absolutely nowhere and there was an awful lot of tapping the fingers and looking up at the ceiling. And you know, "Nehru's like trying"—did Jack say that about Nehru or someone else? "It's like trying to grab in your hand something and it turns out to just be fog." And that's what it was like. And I think Nehru—in a way he was—would you say jealous of Jack, or something? Well, it was just someone so different than—

THE KENNEDYS AND PRIME MINISTER JAWAHARLAL NEHRU AT THE INDIAN EMBASSY, NOVEMBER 9, 1961
Abbie Rowe, National Park Service/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

I think the generational thing played its part here. I think he must—I'm sure he—infinitely—was infinitely pleased that a man like Jack Kennedy was President of the United States, but on the other hand, a young, brilliant man half his age was bound to make him feel uncomfortable.

And then Mrs. Gandhi, his daughter, who's one of those women who when marriage and love and all those things don't turn out right, it's as if something—It all goes back inside you and the poison works inside like an ulcer, so she's a truly bitter woman. And she's the kind of woman who's always hated Jack. You can name so many violently liberal women in politics who were always suspicious of Jack. And they always loved Adlai. And I thought one reason—this is just my own sort of psychology—but that Jack so obviously demanded from a woman—a relationship between a man and a woman where a man would be the leader and a woman would be his wife and look up to him as a man. With Adlai you could have another relationship where—you know, he'd sort of be sweet and you could talk, but you wouldn't ever—wouldn't ever come down to a definite thing. I always thought women who were scared of sex loved Adlai—because there would never be the—

The challenge wasn't there at all.

Yeah. Not that there'd be the challenge with Jack but it was a different kind of man. So, you know, all these sort of twisted, poor little women whose lives hadn't worked out could find a balm in Adlai. And Jack made them nervous, which I used to tell—Jack would say, "Why doesn't so and so . . . " and I'd say, "Jack, it's the greatest compliment to you." Which is, I know, is true. He didn't quite see it. He said that about your wife, as a matter of fact.

Oh, really?

He was very upset—when you came out for him, then a day or so later Marian came out for Adlai Stevenson—and he couldn't understand why because he'd—I think he'd just been down to lunch the day or so before, or a week before, and had a very nice time. You know, and he liked Marian and everything.
¹⁸
Well, I said, "That's because Arthur's so mean to her,
[Schlesinger laughs]
and Adlai was so nice." "I saw them together later, you know." I said, "That's different, that's her own personal problem, you know. That's got nothing to do with you. You mustn't hold it against Marian." And then later on when we were all in the White House together, then he—loved her and saw that she didn't really dislike him.

Oh, no, Marian, I may say, lived to regret that. I got such a—I remember a funny letter from Bobby after that. Something—he was writing about something else and he had a postscript to the effect, "I see you can't control your wife any better than I can control mine."
¹⁹
You know, that was an act of old loyalty on Marian's part.

Yeah.

She thought I was—shouldn't, you know—
²⁰

But I mean, in my marriage, I could never conceive—and I remember I said it in an interview once, and all these women—we got all these irate letters—someone said, "Where do you get your opinions?" And I said, "I get all my opinions from my husband." Which is true. How could I have any political opinions, you know? His were going to be the best. And I could never conceive of not voting for whoever my husband was for. Anyone who I'd be married to. I suppose if I was married to—well, you know. So that was just so strange because that was—I mean, it was really a rather terribly Victorian or Asiatic relationship which we had, which I had—

Yeah, a Japanese wife.

Yeah, which I think's the best. But anyway, that was Mrs. Gandhi.

She was a rancorous woman, and spiteful. I mean, she exuded spite. Was Nehru different on his home ground?
²¹

Well, he was terribly sweet again to Lee and I, and he would come home every afternoon and take us for walks in the garden and we'd feed the pandas, and I think what he liked—one of his sisters, Mrs. Hutheesing—I guess she's the rather right-wing one who lives in Bombay, but she's great fun.
²²
And she said to me—she'd come into Lee and my room and talk. And she said, "It's so good for my brother to have you two girls here. It's some relaxation." Because she says his daughter fills the poor man's life with politics. It's politics at lunch, politics at tea, politics at dinner. He never has any relaxation. So that visit—I mean, nothing profound was talked about or even that we were going to Pakistan next, but, you know, it was a relaxation for him—the kind of thing I'd try to bring into Jack's life in our evenings at home. Someone who wasn't connected with what was worrying him all day. And so he just loved that trip and we got to be—well, he used to walk me back to my bedroom every night—two nights, I think, we were there, and sit in there for about an hour and talk to me.

PRIME MINISTER NEHRU AND JACQUELINE KENNEDY IN INDIA
USIS/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

And he'd be lively, would he? He wouldn't have this kind of vacant, passive—

Well, never lively, but sort of gentle and he would talk and he has those great brown eyes. I'd read all his autobiography and I'd ask him about some of those, you know, times—and he talked.

What would he talk about? About his own past and—

Well, I asked him about the times in prison, and everything—his life. And yeah, he'd talk about some of that. Or else he'd talk about people there, or make a little joke. He always was so—I've written it all down somewhere, everything we talked about, so maybe I can find it. It's the only thing I ever wrote down.

Oh, good. No, let's find that and the Library should have a copy.
²³
The other big thing that happened in the fall of '61, or another one, was the resumption of nuclear testing by the Soviet Union and then—which confronted us with the problem of whether we should resume nuclear testing or not.
²⁴
That was an old interest of the President's, was it?

Yes. I can remember him being so worried at the time about our resuming, and how long you should—you could possibly put it off and then everyone—I mean, that was a terrible time for him. There was nothing that worried him more through—would it be '
61
and '
62
?—than all this testing. But it started so long ago. Because I can remember when David Gore came to Hyannis the fall we were married—would be October or November
1953
—and he was doing something at the UN on disarmament and he and Jack were talking. And you know, it was the first time I'd ever heard—it seemed so extraordinary—you never saw it in newspapers here. That you should sort of disarm or come to some agreement and then that would be possible without selling out or—you know, when you always thought all the Bertrand Russells
²⁵
and "ban the bombers" and people were all sort of "pinks"—I mean, I just thought this from reading David Lawrence
²⁶
in the newspapers. And I remember then—from then on, Jack started to say in his speeches that it was a disgrace that there were less than a hundred people working on disarmament in Washington—or less than ten, maybe.

Less than a hundred.

Less than a hundred. But he said that in all—and I think he said it all through his Senate campaign.
²⁷
He certainly said it all through his campaign for the presidency, you know, but it started so long ago that he was thinking about that. And in a way, then David Gore came back again—in maybe '
58
or—yes, or '
57
—I don't know what year he and Sissy came to the Cape. Again they'd be talking about that. And I remember when Harold Macmillan resigned last summer.
²⁸
Well, Jack was so sad for that man—that he should have to go out in all the messy, sad way he did, you know, and he said, "People really don't realize what Macmillan has done," and he said he was the greatest friend of the Atlantic Alliance. But he said this nuclear disarmament thing—he just cared about that for so long. So that's what I tried—and then he sent him this touching telegram and I remember poor Macmillan then.
²⁹
Not many people were saying nice things to him. And David asked if the telegram could be made public, and Jack said, "Of course." And that's what I tried to put in when I talked to him on Telstar
³⁰
just last week on Jack's—what would have been his forty-seventh birthday. You know, the things that I knew that Jack thought about him, and I found that telegram and read it and tried to say what Jack had said about him—and I kept thinking, "I just hope de Gaulle's listening." Not that anything matters now.

I have the impression that we would not have had a test ban treaty if both the President and the prime minister had not been so deeply committed and forced the issue so constantly on their advisers.
³¹

I know. I know that's true, and I also think having David Gore here at the time made it—

Indispensable, yes.

Yeah. Sometimes—well, we can go into that relationship at another time, but so many things happened. He would come for dinner, and something awful would be going wrong in British Guiana or somewhere, and he would—all the time of Skybolt he was with us—and he would call and everything would be kept smooth. But what I just wanted to say about—I was thinking when I thought of Jack and Macmillan really making this test ban thing possible—of just how outrageous of de Gaulle. Of the one thing that really matters and that egomaniac not to be associated with that when that's going to be the one thing that matters in this whole century. And then Graham Sutherland, who's a painter, who I saw a couple of weeks ago about doing a picture of Jack—but he said something to me so interesting. He said, "The extraordinary thing about President Kennedy was that power made him a better man," and he said it made so many people worse men. He knew Winston Churchill. He painted him. He said Winston, you know, became less nice—and of course, it made Adenauer meaner. And of course, de Gaulle was the classic example. Well, it made—Jack a chance to work for good and I really think Harold Macmillan too.