Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy (36 page)

Did the President talk much about Africa? The Congo?

Yes. Once he said about Ed Gullion and Bill Attwood—and Bill Attwood had gotten sick there and everything and, you know, you were so sorry for him—he said, "Those are so much more the important places to be now as a diplomat." And he said, "London and Paris and everything don't matter anymore. There's the telephone and, you know, it's really done that way. But," he says, "it's those far-out places in Africa that are, you know, the exciting places for a diplomat to be, and where you can do the most." Well, Ed Gullion, he'd always had a special feeling for, because when he was doing his Indochina speech, which was the year before we were married, because I'd had to type it all up from that summer—I mean, translate all these French books and everything—Ed Gullion was the only person in the State Department who would sort of talk to Jack, and who would really say how awful Indochina was and the way it was going.
²³
And I guess he got fired because of that, or—or else he got—no, he got put in some—

He got shifted out of that area and given other things.

Yeah. And put in some pathetic little post. We always used to see him all the time and, well then, I think Jack named him to the Congo, just showed what he thought of him. He really thought he was exceptional.

In 1963, one of the big things on the President's mind was, of course, Vietnam and Diem and Madame Nhu, and all that.
²⁴

Yes, well, you know, obviously it was trouble for so long and you didn't ask Jack about it when he came home, and everything. But I know once—I forget how long Lodge was out there before things really got bad. About how many months?

He was out about, I guess, about three months before Diem was thrown out.

Well, I know that he started acting rather strangely, and he said he wouldn't answer their cables and you couldn't get through or—anyway, as if he was kind of taking it into his own hands, or something. And what I can remember is when the coup came, Jack was just sick. I know he'd done something to try and stop—Lodge had started something and they'd stopped. All of this you can learn from other people because a lot of it I learned later. But he'd done something to stop it. But anyway, when Diem was murdered, Jack was—oh, he just had that awful look that he had at the time of the Bay of Pigs. I mean, he was just so—just wounded, and he was shaking his head and it was home in our—you know, in our room at the White House—and he was saying, "Oh!"—you know—"No! Why?" And he said Diem fought Communism for twenty years and everything, and it shouldn't have ended like this. He was just sick about it. Madame Nhu tearing all around, saying things about him—I suppose she was more of an irritant. But once I asked him, "Why are these women like her and Clare Luce, who both obviously are attractive to men, why are they—why do they have this queer thing for power?" She was everything that Jack found unattractive—that I found unattractive in a woman. And he said, "It's strange," he said, "but it's because they resent getting their power through men." And so, they become really—just hating men, whatever you call that. She was rather like Clare Luce.
[whispers]
I wouldn't be surprised if they were lesbians.

Clare Luce wrote very favorable pieces about you, remember?

Yeah, but Clare Luce had come to lunch with Jack once in the White House when Tish was still there.
²⁵
And I remember—oh, she so badly wanted to come to see him as a man would. She wanted to see him in his office, or something. Anyway, a sort of a male lunch was arranged, and Tish told me she was so nervous before, she'd had about three martinis.
²⁶
And I was so mad at her that I stood—I managed to be just outside our dining room, standing there, pretending to shuffle through my desk, and I just really cut her dead, so that when Jack introduced us and I just stood with my hands at my side and finally walked over. He said to me later, "You know," he said, "if you're going to cut someone dead, dear"—you know, he was sort of touched at my loyalty because it could only make Mrs. Luce hurt me more,
²⁷
but he really wasn't very pleased at my doing that. He said, "Do it naturally, but don't just set it up and lay the trap for them." And apparently, all through that lunch, Mrs. Luce, who I guess was a bit loaded, just went on and lit into him and told him all these things. And finally—he was always, you know, so courteous to women—he said, "Well, I'm sorry, Mrs. Luce, but unfortunately you're not in a position to do anything about these things, and I am." And that's how it ended. And the sad thing about that is they'd been friends and she'd been a friend of Mr. Kennedy's and he'd helped her so. You know, the time when Morse and all that, when she didn't go to Brazil?
²⁸
Well, both Harry Luce and Mr. Kennedy told her she shouldn't go and Jack called her up especially and said, "You know, now, they're wrong. You know, you'll be much happier there. You need to be doing something." And he said, "All this will blow over and, you know, I really advise you to take it." And, "My father's older and he sees things his way." Well, she didn't take it and I think Jack was completely right. What did she do? Then she went back to Arizona and made little mosaic tables, and got bitterer and bitterer and more and more venomous.
²⁹

And swam underwater.

Yeah. And he tried to help her. So for her to turn on him like that—well again, this resentment of men.

And Harry Luce remained friendly.

Yeah, I think. Well, I know Jack saw him a couple of times and, you know, it was all right—I mean, he might blow up at him for certain things, but they would— it never got bitter that way.

How did Luce happen to write the introduction to
Why England Slept
?

Oh, that was Mr. Kennedy, because Jack had gotten Arthur Krock to do it. And then Mr. Kennedy thought that it might look as if Arthur Krock had written the book or something, because he'd been an old friend of the family—and that it would be better if Henry Luce did it. So it was sort of changed midstream, and that's one thing Arthur Krock never forgave Jack for. I mean, the last time we saw him, he even brought it up.

Oh, really?

Or forgave Mr. Kennedy for it. It was a real slight. And you know, so that's where this queer enmity that Krock had for him, who, after all, he'd known as a young boy and known me and he'd sort of been his mentor—not exactly mentor, but you know, seen him and everything. This sort of bitterness started. And that's when. Mr. Kennedy changing it.

I can remember in the first winter, the dinner at the White House, when the Krocks were there, so there was still a slight relationship then, but then Krock became absolutely hopeless.

You try over and over. You see, he'd been a friend of me growing up, gotten me my job in the
Times-Herald
, always a friend of my grandfather's—we used to write poems to each other, for both of us. And you try, over and over, to do something about the relationship, and each time you just get slapped in the face with a wet fish, and finally you gave up. He was too bitter, and he couldn't bear to see someone young coming on. And we went out of our way to be nice, and we even went to their house for dinner—as President.
³⁰

You did? When was this? In the beginning or—

Yes, sometime that year. I think it was in the spring.

On Vietnam, it was rather interesting that the President should send Cabot Lodge, whom he had defeated in the Senate in 1952 and who ran on the opposite ticket in 1960. Had he and Lodge maintained particular personal relations in this period?

No, the only time I can remember, we asked Lodge to the dinner for Abboud of the Sudan. And Lodge was really nice that evening. I mean, I think Jack had always thought of him as rather arrogant and everything. Well, he seemed so touched to be there and so sort of, well, polite. And I remember Jack walked him to the door. Once he was President, he did these extraordinary sort of thoughtful things, to go out of his way. Lodge was just very nice then, and when we went upstairs I said, you know, he just seemed so nice that evening, and Jack said, "Yeah." I think he probably did it—don't you think?—rather thinking it might be such a brilliant thing to do because Vietnam was rather hopeless anyway—and put a Republican there. I don't know. That's what I read in the papers. I never really asked him why he sent Lodge there.

I'm sure that entered in. I think Rusk suggested it, and I think the President was attracted to it partly for that reason, and partly because Lodge had served as liaison officer with the French army in the Second World War and spoke excellent French.

Oh, that's right.

And partly because he wanted to figure out that we had enough prestige to recapture control of our policies from General Harkins
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and the military. I think all those things may have entered in. I think Latin America was something the President cared about a great deal, obviously. And you mentioned earlier about his admiration for Betancourt and for Lleras Camargo. Did he ever—do you remember Frondizi of Argentina?

No. That was a men's lunch.

That was a men's lunch. Um-hmm. The Brazilian trip was always about to take place.

Oh, we always had our bags packed for that trip. And I remember one so interesting thing that he said about Quadros
³²
when Quadros resigned. He did resign, didn't he?

Yes, he did.

And Jack shook his head. He was rather disgusted and he said, "You don't have the right to do that." One doesn't have the right to do that. "I mean, you don't have to run again, or something, but you don't have the right, once you're in there and the heat gets too strong, to just get out of the kitchen." So I think everyone had thought quite a lot of Quadros before, hadn't they?—and pinned a lot of hopes on him. And Jack was—well, not horrified, because that's—too strong a word—but that just wasn't in his way of doing things. I mean, when he took on something—just the way he was always prepared to lose this election—I don't think he would have, but he would be talking about it—on civil rights. Sometimes when things were bad, and he'd say, "Well, maybe"—but you know it was something that had to be done. You could never really be a great president unless you were prepared to be hated or to lose on something that counted. Again the whole thing of
Profiles in Courage
. And that's just what Quadros was the opposite of.

Do you remember any particular reaction to Goulart?
³³

No, that was—that lunch, again, I was sick. And I think he thought Goulart was sort of a shifty character and—you know, I mean, well, I mean, you know—Goulart was really messing everything up, wasn't he?—in the economy and the Communists. I thought—I think he thought he was a faker and a robber and a—but I don't know what he exactly thought.

Did he have any particular—do you remember anything particular about Peru?

Yes, you know, Prado of Peru had been here on a state visit. He was really rather a comic character. But anyway, when he was overthrown, it reminds me so now of everyone saying that the United States recognized the junta in Brazil too quickly, because we held off recognition or something. We cut—

We suspended relations and stopped aid.

That's right. And later on Pat's—Rosita Prado, who Pat
³⁴
went to school with, wrote Jack a letter saying, "You saved my father's life"—because they were going to execute Prado and, I guess, his wife. And because of what we did and everything, they let him get out and get to Paris and all that. But, you know, just making it rough for them for a while there. Finally, it made it better in the long run, instead of just saying, "Hooray, hooray, they've overthrown"—and I guess—no—

No, you're absolutely right.

That's right, no—yeah.

What we did was we suspended and said, we will resume if you agree to do certain things like give parties political freedom, restore freedom of the press, agree to hold elections. They finally agreed to do these things, and then we resumed relations, and it made a great difference.

And in Brazil, the minute the junta took over this time, everyone just had cheers. And that was the most disillusioning thing. Betancourt was here talking to me about it, two months ago. He said all—half of Congress, or Parliament, whatever it is, all the great writers, everyone has their civil liberties taken away from them. And that was one of the most despairing things in Latin America—the difference between Kennedy and Johnson. It affected all the countries. Jack never would have done it that way.

Charlie Bartlett played a role in working out the conditions with the new government in Peru. Do you remember anything about that?