Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy (49 page)

21
. C
HARLES
W
RIGHTSMAN
(1895–1986) was an Oklahoma oil tycoon and social friend of the Kennedys, along with his wife, Jayne Larkin Wrightsman (1919– ), who was a close friend to Jacqueline and who served on her Fine Arts Committee to supervise and raise funds for the White House restoration.

22
. J
óZSEF
C
ARDINAL
M
INDSZENTY
(1892–1975) of Budapest was sentenced, after a 1949 show trial, to life imprisonment for "treason" against the Soviet-dominated government of Hungary.

23
. As legend had it, when asked by a friend for a loan, one of the banking Rothschilds replied that he would do better: he would escort the friend through the Paris bourse and thereby elevate the friend's standing among financiers. JFK had long enjoyed this concept. After the 1960 election, for example, the President-elect told his campaign adviser Hyman Raskin of Chicago that he would give him a better thank-you gift than a federal job: he would call Raskin to his Georgetown house for counsel.

24
. As a retired general, Taylor wore civilian attire.

25
. J
AMES
G
AVIN
(1907–1990), fabled commander of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment on D-day, was JFK's first ambassador to Paris. Like Maxwell Taylor, General Gavin had quit Eisenhower's Pentagon over defense strategy and published a book (
War and Peace in the Space Age
) explaining why.

26
. It was after the Bay of Pigs that JFK convinced his brother to expand his portfolio and become his confidential adviser and troubleshooter on foreign, defense, and intelligence policy—especially toward Cuba and the Soviet Union.

27
. President Kennedy asked Taylor to head a committee to conduct a postmortem on the Bay of Pigs failure. Other panel members were Robert Kennedy, Allen Dulles, and Admiral Arleigh Burke.

28
. JFK felt responsible for the almost 1,200 invaders captured by Castro. The evidence was his willingness to brave domestic political criticism by encouraging a public campaign, including a "Tractors for Freedom" committee, headed by eminent Americans, to meet Castro's ransom demands for about $60 million worth of tractors, drugs, baby food, and medical equipment in exchange for their freedom. In December 1962, the Kennedys welcomed the liberated Cubans at a raucous rally in Miami's Orange Bowl, where Jacqueline told the ex-prisoners in Spanish that she hoped John would grow up to be as brave as they were.

29
. O
LEG
P
ENKOVSKY
(1919–1963) was a valuable secret agent for Western intelligence in Moscow when he was exposed, arrested, tried, and executed.

30
. Tractors for Freedom Committee.

31
. To avoid disrupting the Joseph Kennedy household in Palm Beach, the President and First Lady leased the neighboring home of Mr. and Mrs. C. Michael Paul.

32
. E
RNEIDO
O
LIVA
G
ONZALEZ
(1932– ) was deputy commander of invasion Brigade 2506 and had just been released from Castro's prison. The following year, he and some of his comrades received U.S. Army commissions.

33
. X
AVIER
C
UGAT
(1900–1990) was a popular Spanish-born bandleader who had spent his childhood in Cuba.

34
. A large reason that Oliva and his comrades were so disillusioned was that President Johnson had just shut down the considerable program of covert action against Cuba that had been quietly supervised by the Kennedy brothers.

35
. In the Orange Bowl, with the freed Cubans shouting "Guerra! Guerra! Guerra!," JFK, much affected by the scene, accepted Brigade 2506's flag and pledged to return it "in a free Havana."

36
. D
ONALD
B
ARNES
(1930–2003) was the government's senior Spanish interpreter, and was duly interviewed for the Kennedy Library's oral history program.

37
. C
HARLES
S
EDGWICK
(1912–1983).

38
. Raids from the sea were part of the U.S. covert action waged against Castro's Cuba.

39
. J
EAN
D
ANIEL
(1920– ) was editor of the French socialist journal
L'Observateur
. In October 1963, he was scheduled to interview Castro. Before his departure for Havana, his friend Ben Bradlee arranged for him to see President Kennedy in the Oval Office. Daniel lunched with Castro on November 22, 1963, and they learned together of the President's assassination, which Castro pronounced "bad news." In the December 14, 1963,
New Republic
, Daniel wrote that during his conversation with JFK, the President had been surprisingly outspoken in accepting American responsibility for the seizure of Cuba by Castro and the excesses that followed, telling Daniel that "to some extent," Batista had been the "incarnation" of American "sins" against Cuba, and that "now we shall have to pay for those sins."

40
. E
VELYN
N
ORTON
L
INCOLN
(1909–1995) was JFK's personal secretary from 1953 until his death.

41
. Miro Cardona had been angry that after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy administration seemed less aggressive about trying to overthrow Castro.

42
. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress was designed to increase economic cooperation with Latin American countries and position the United States as the friend and champion of reform, not dictatorship.

43
. In December 1961, the Kennedys went to Venezuela and Colombia.

44
. In June 1962, they visited Mexico City, riding through ebullient crowds, as guests of President Adolfo López Mateos (1909–1969), president of Mexico from 1958 to 1964, whom both Kennedys liked and admired for his social reforms.

45
. She refers to their arrival for JFK's meeting with Khrushchev in June 1961.

46
. H
AROLD
M
ACMILLAN
(1894–1986), the Conservative British prime minister from 1957 to 1963, made his visit to Kennedy in April 1961. Soon he was JFK's closest friend among foreign leaders. They were related through the marriage of Kennedy's late sister Kathleen (1920–1948), known as "Kick," to William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, nephew of Macmillan's wife, Lady Dorothy. Hartington had died in World War II. Alberto Lleras Camargo (1906–1990) was a former journalist and the Colombian president from 1958 to 1962. During the Kennedys' visit to Bogotá in 1961, Camargo had given Mrs. Kennedy a tour of his presidential palace, a glittering museum of Colombian history, which she later considered to be an inspiration for her restoration of the White House.

47
. R
óMULO
B
ETANCOURT
(1908–1981), Venezuelan president from 1945 to 1948 and 1959 to 1964, known as the "father of Venezuelan democracy."

48
. In 1961, Kennedy resisted pressures to deploy the U.S. military against pro-Communist forces in Laos. Instead he authorized negotiation, which resulted, the following year, in the country's neutrality.

49
. At the end of World War II, when the Allies drew up plans for postwar Germany, they left Berlin deep within the Soviet zone of occupation. The city itself was effectively divided into two sectors—East Berlin for the Soviets, West Berlin for the Americans, British, and French. By the late 1950s, Soviet-backed East Germany was an economic ruin, in contrast to the "miracle" of West Germany. Vast numbers of East Germans were escaping to the West through Berlin. To stop this refugee flow and score points against the Free World, Khrushchev demanded that the city be unified, which, because of its geographical position, would make it subject to Soviet whims and effectively force the West out of the German capital. The Western allies had committed themselves to preserve their rights in Berlin, if necessary, by going to war. When Kennedy left Khrushchev after their harsh Vienna encounter in June 1961, the Berlin Crisis was on, with the President calling up American reservists. Then suddenly in August, the Soviets and East Germans built a hideous wall around West Berlin to stop the "brain drain" to the West. Although Kennedy opposed the wall politically, he privately realized that the Soviet leader was providing himself a face-saving means to wind down the Berlin Crisis. The President told aides, "A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war."

50
. N
GO
D
INH
D
IEM
(1901–1963) was president of South Vietnam from the French withdrawal in 1955 until his death in a military coup. Jacqueline refers to protests like that of the Buddhist priest who burned himself to death in Saigon in the summer of 1963 to protest Diem's repressive policies.

51
. Both Kennedys were engaged by the literary quality and humor of the cables from JFK's ambassador to India.

52
. During times of stress, Jacqueline would cheer the President up by leaving him hand-drawn cartoons and limericks, bringing the children to his office, and having him served some of his most preferred foods, such as from Joe's Stone Crab from Miami. In private, she also performed uncanny impersonations of some of the people with whom JFK had to deal. She could imitate the French ambassador doing his own impersonation of de Gaulle.

53
. W
ILLIAM
W
ALTON
(1910–1994), journalist, novelist, painter, and soldier, had been dropped into France at the start of the D-day invasion. A close friend of both Kennedys (he hung paintings in JFK's Oval Office after the inauguration), Walton accepted Jackie's appeal to serve as chair of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which oversaw the aesthetic design of federal buildings and monuments. "It is all going to be involved with all the things we care about," she wrote him in June 1962. "Lovely buildings will be torn down—and cheesy skyscrapers go up. Perhaps saving old buildings and having the new ones be right isn't the most important thing in the world—if you are waiting for the bomb—but I think we are always going to be waiting for the bomb and it won't ever come and so to save the old—and to make the new beautiful is terribly important.''

54
. K
WAME
N
KRUMAH
(1909–1972) became the first president of an independent Ghana in 1960. Soon Nkrumah was busy amassing a corrupt fortune, placing restrictions on his people's freedoms, and flirting with the Soviet Union.

55
. H
AILE
S
ELASSIE
(1892–1975) was the Ethiopian emperor, known as the "Lion of Judah," and by tradition descended from King Solomon.

56
. S
UKARNO
(1901–1970), after leading Indonesia to independence from the Dutch, was its first president from 1945 to 1967 and widely known for both lust and corruption. He also, after a fashion, collected art.

57
. A
LBERTO
V
ARGAS
(1896–1982) was a Peruvian-born painter who created pinups of beautiful women, both nude and clothed, which appeared in
Esquire
and
Playboy
.

58
. G
EORGE
P
ETTY
(1894–1975) painted female subjects in poses similar to those of Vargas.

59
. A
LEKSEI
A
DZHUBEI
(1924–1993) was Khrushchev's son-in-law and editor of
Izvestia
. JFK received him in November 1961 at Hyannis Port for an interview that was published in both of their countries.

60
. Mrs. Kennedy presumably refers to the daughter-in-law who accompanied the Khrushchevs to Vienna.

61
. R
ADA
K
HRUSHCHEVA
A
DZHUBEI
(1929– ).

62
. A
NATOLY
D
OBRYNIN
(1919–2010), a lifelong professional diplomat, came to Washington as Soviet ambassador in 1962.

63
. Walton called on Soviet officials in Moscow on a trip arranged before the President's death to meet Soviet artists.

64
. Social secretary Letitia Baldrige.

65
. After the two leaders' first day of talks, the Kennedys and Khrushchevs were feted with a dinner and performance at Schönbrunn Palace.

66
. Rose Kennedy, who came to Vienna.