Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy (3 page)

So now, at long last, it is her turn to speak. If you pore through the thousands of books about John Fitzgerald Kennedy, you will find the voice of one crucial witness virtually absent. As the
New York Times
obituary said the morning after her death on May
19
,
1994
, "Her silence about her past, especially about the Kennedy years and her marriage to the President, was always something of a mystery." She wrote no autobiography or memoir.

Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born on July
28
,
1929
, in Southampton, New York, the summer family seat of both her paternal and maternal lines. Her suntanned, Yale-educated, French-American father, John V. Bouvier III, had followed his forefathers to Wall Street; his career never recovered from the stock market crash of
1929
. Her mother, Janet Norton Lee, was the daughter of a self-made Irish-American tycoon in New York banking and real estate. From her Park Avenue and Long Island childhood, Jackie (she preferred Jacqueline, but friends and family rarely used her full given name) liked to ride horses, create whimsical drawings, and read books—especially art history, poetry, French history, and literature. When she was twelve, her parents were bitterly divorced, and her mother wed Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr., a Standard Oil heir, who made Jackie and her younger sister, Lee, at home on his picturesque estates in McLean, Virginia, and Newport, Rhode Island. As a student at Miss Porter's School (Farmington) in Connecticut, where she boarded her horse Danseuse, teachers found Jackie strong-willed, irreverent, and highly intelligent.

After two years at Vassar, which did not inspire her, the young woman sprang to life during a junior year at the Sorbonne and the University of Grenoble. Returning to live at Merrywood, her stepfather's house on the Potomac, she was graduated in
1951
from George Washington University and surpassed twelve hundred other college women to win
Vogue
's Prix de Paris, for which she designed a sample issue of the magazine and wrote an essay on "People I Wish I Had Known" (Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, and Sergei Diaghilev). The prize offered a year as a
Vogue
junior editor in New York and Paris. She declined it—to the relief of her mother, who was inclined to take her daughter's strong interest in France as an unwelcome sign of allegiance to Jack Bouvier. Instead Jackie took a job as "Inquiring Photographer" for the
Washington Times-Herald
. In that role, she began seeing the man who would become her husband.

The first time she had met Jack Kennedy was in
1948
, on a train from Washington, D.C., to New York when, as she recorded at the time, she briefly chatted with an attentive "tall thin young congressman with very long reddish hair." But the encounter came to naught. That same year, her family friend Charles Bartlett took her "across this great crowd" at his brother's Long Island wedding to meet Jack Kennedy, but "by the time I got her across, why, he'd left." Finally in the spring of
1951
, in Bartlett and his wife Martha's Georgetown dining room, Jack and Jackie had their official introduction. After what she called "a spasmodic courtship," the Francophile aesthete and the fast-ascending senator from Massachusetts married in Newport on September
12
,
1953
, launching the decade of their life that you will read about in this book.

During the months after John Kennedy's murder, his thirty-four-year-old widow found memories of their White House life, which she calls in this volume "our happiest years," so traumatic that she asked her Secret Service drivers to please arrange her trips so that she would never accidentally glimpse the old mansion. She intended to stay away from the White House for the rest of her life—and she did, with only one exception. (In
1971
, when Aaron Shikler finished his official portraits of the thirty-fifth president and his wife, she agreed to make a very private visit with her children to the White House, where they viewed the portraits and dined with President Richard Nixon and his family.) At the end of
1963
, Mrs. Kennedy feared that reminiscing at length about life with her husband would make her "start to cry again," but she was determined to win Jack a fair hearing from historians. Since JFK had been deprived of the chance afforded other presidents of defending their historical record in books, articles, and public comments, she felt an overwhelming obligation to do whatever she could. To ensure that he was not forgotten, within days of Dallas, Jackie was already trying to imagine the architecture of a future Kennedy Library—planned for Harvard, on a Charles River site selected by the President just a month before he died.

At the start of December
1963
, when the widow and her children had not yet departed their White House quarters, her husband's aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., amassed some of the most moving letters he had received about his late boss and sent them upstairs to the widow. The bow-tied Schlesinger, known for "his acid wit and a magnificent bounce to his step," was an ex–Harvard history professor, one of the nation's most respected scholars, author of award-winning books on the "ages" of Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt, and speechwriter during Adlai Stevenson's two campaigns for president. He had known JFK since they were Harvard students together, but his friendship with Jackie had really begun during the
1960
presidential campaign, when her husband, wishing not to be seen encircled by liberal academics, had asked Schlesinger to send him tactical advice through her. Now, in the wake of the assassination, the historian was already planning research for the book on the thirty-fifth presidency that JFK and his other aides had always presumed that Schlesinger would one day write.

From her White House rooms, Jacqueline replied in longhand to Schlesinger's note: "I return your letters—I am so happy to have seen them—I have not had time to read any yet." She wrote that someone had urged that the Kennedy Library try to sustain her husband's influence on the young: "Well I don't see how it can keep going without him—but you could think of a way—it would be nice to try." She told Schlesinger she had been "very impressed" by an address he had given about her husband: "It was all the things I thought about Jack—even though he didn't live to see his dreams accomplished—he so badly wanted to be a great President—I think he still can be—because he started those ideas—which is what you said. And he should be great for that." She urged Schlesinger to write about him soon, "while all is fresh—while you still remember his exact words."

As Schlesinger later recalled, an oral history project was "much on my mind after Dallas, and also on Robert Kennedy's mind." At Harvard, he had been an early champion of this new research method. Anxious that important historical evidence was getting lost because people were writing fewer letters and diaries, pioneers at Columbia University and elsewhere were interviewing historical figures, taping the conversations, and placing the transcripts in public archives. As "a matter of urgency," Schlesinger reminded Jacqueline that—in contrast to Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, who kept diaries and wrote surprisingly revealing letters—John Kennedy's leadership was often exercised on the telephone or in person, leaving no written record.
¹
Without a "crash" oral history program, capturing memories from New Frontiersmen while still recent, much of the Kennedy history would disappear. In January
1964
, Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy approved a plan for scholars and members of the Kennedy circle to record the recollections of "thousands" of people who knew the President—relatives, friends, cabinet secretaries, Massachusetts pols, foreign leaders, and others who had enjoyed "more than a perfunctory" relationship with him. Along with RFK's own oral history, the centerpiece of the collection would be interviews with John Kennedy's widow, which would be performed by Schlesinger himself.

ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.
George Tames/
The New York Times
/Redux

Thus on Monday, March
2
,
1964
, Schlesinger walked to Jacqueline Kennedy's new home at
3017
N Street and climbed the long flight of wooden steps to start the first of seven interviews with the former First Lady. In her grief, Mrs. Kennedy had bought this
1794
house, which stood across the street from what was once Robert Todd Lincoln's. She was doing her best to provide a normal life for six-year-old Caroline and three-year-old John, which she saw as both her duty and her salvation. Tourist buses stopped outside throughout the day (and sometimes night), disgorging sightseers who littered her steps, pointed Instamatic cameras at her front windows, and called out her children's names, forcing her to keep the curtains in her freshly painted white living room closed.

Inside the house, passing through sliding doors, Schlesinger joined Jacqueline in the living room, whose bookshelves displayed artifacts from ancient Rome, Egypt, and Greece that President Kennedy had given her over the years. Facing away from the front windows, she liked to sit on a crushed-velvet sofa. Atop a three-tiered table beside her were two framed photographs: the smiling JFK beside his desk, clapping while his children danced, another of him campaigning among a crowd. Placing his tape recorder beside a silver cigarette box on a low black Oriental table, Schlesinger would have sat to Mrs. Kennedy's right on a pale yellow chair he had seen upstairs at the White House. He urged her to speak as though addressing "an historian of the twenty-first century." As he later recalled, "From time to time, she would ask me to turn off the machine so that she could say what she wanted to say, and then ask, Should I say that on the recorder?' . . . In general, what I would say was, Why don't you say it? . . . You have control over the transcript.'" During this and the next six sittings, starting with a quavering voice that grew stronger with time, Jacqueline unburdened herself as the tape machine also picked up the sounds of her lighting cigarettes, of ice cubes in glasses, dogs barking in the distance, trucks rumbling down N Street, and jets roaring overhead.

PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY WITH CAROLINE AND JOHN IN THE OVAL OFFICE
Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

For anyone who doubts Jacqueline Kennedy's emotional self-discipline, note that during these months of her greatest despair, she could will herself to speak in such detail about her vanished former life. And Schlesinger was not even her only interlocutor that spring. In April
1964
, she sat for hours at night in that same parlor to be questioned by William Manchester, who was researching his authorized book about the assassination. In order to spare Mrs. Kennedy the agony of twice recounting those events, Schlesinger left the task to Manchester. Nevertheless, on the June day after she completed her final interview with Schlesinger, she was forced to sit in that same room to be questioned by members of the Warren Commission about her husband's final motorcade.

Read after almost a half century, the interviews in this book revise scene after scene of the history of the
1950
s and early
1960
s that we thought we knew. While no such work ever tells the entire story, this oral history constitutes a fresh internal narrative of John Kennedy's life as senator, candidate, and President, and his wife's experience of those years, providing new detail on what JFK and Jacqueline privately said to each other, her backstage role in his political life, diplomacy, and world crises, and her definite and consistently original views about the changing cast of characters who surrounded them both. The close student of the Kennedy years knows how Jackie expanded her husband's range with her command of French and Spanish, her knowledge about the history of Europe and its colonies, her background in the arts. But even today, many presume that she was relatively indifferent to political life. When Schlesinger met her at Hyannis Port in
1959
, like others at the time, he found her "flighty on politics," asking elementary questions with "wide-eyed naivete." This behavior was not surprising, because well-bred young women of Jacqueline's generation were not encouraged to sound like intellectuals. Nor would it help her husband for her to vent her more caustic opinions around anyone but their most trusted friends. But as this oral history confirms, she knew considerably more about John Kennedy's political life than she let on to outsiders, and her influence on his official relationships was substantial.