The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (59 page)

Jack’s taste in food went to meat as long as it was steak not gussied up with silly sauces. Jackie, however, believed that style was not something that one wore only on festive occasions. For Jack, it was an exceedingly expensive lesson, and the food bills were the least of it.

Jackie returned one day with a spectacular find in eighteenth-century French chairs for the living room. Jack could hardly contain his displeasure before his old friend David Ormsby-Gore, later Lord Harlech. “I don’t know why!” he fumed. “What’s the point of spending all this money? I mean a chair is a chair and it’s perfectly good the chair I’m sitting in—what’s the point of all this fancy stuff?” The point of all this fancy stuff, as Jack took a number of years to realize, was that it impressed the hoi polloi enormously and brought him a cachet for high style that until then he neither possessed nor valued.

During the first winter of their marriage, Jackie worked on a private little tome for her half-sister, Janet Auchincloss, called
A Book for Janet: In Case You Are Ever Thinking of Getting Married This Is a Story to Tell You What It’s Like.
The book was a wistful romantic account full of gentle caricatures of the couple—for instance, Jackie looking to see whether a flag flew over the Senate chambers, signaling that her Jack was off doing the nation’s business. And there was a drawing of a slightly risqué Jack in bare hairy legs saying: “I
demand my marital rights.” It was in some ways like a children’s book yet in its way was a sophisticated fantasy.

Charley Bartlett observed a marriage so different from the one portrayed in Jackie’s book that he at times regretted that he had ever introduced the couple. Bartlett felt that this exquisite young woman who had talked so fervently of art and culture had become a dispirited wife who sought in things what she could not find in marriage. He noticed “a sad look in her eyes.” One day the same woman who was writing a fantasy about her marriage got into her car and drove over to the Walter Reed Antiques Shop on Georgia Avenue to sell many of her wedding gifts.

Jackie grew gloomy and withdrawn, and around Jack that was simply unacceptable. “Jack went crazy when someone sulked,” said Lem Billings. “He couldn’t stand the tension, and he’d go absolutely crazy trying to contrive ways to restore a friendly atmosphere. Jackie saw this almost immediately and used her sulks masterfully.”

Jack, who considered faithfulness a fool’s virtue, was continuing with his affairs. Like his father, Jack had learned to cloak his marital deceits in an elaborate garb of euphemism. He had an unlikely admirer of his adulterous trysts in his father-in-law, Jack Bouvier, who continued to cut his own wide swath through the female population. “Miss New Zealand isn’t too bad, and it might be fun to run into her again some time,” he wrote Jack, like a gourmet discussing meals he has eaten. “I would like to see that English nurse of yester-year, she of my twenty minute romance, which you and your gang so rudely but effectively interrupted. All this providing … I still have the ‘wherewithal.’”

In the summer of 1954, while his bride of less than a year was in Europe, Jack traveled up to Northeast Harbor, Maine, for a house party. Jack’s host was an old friend, Langdon P. Marvin Jr., who
Life
magazine had dubbed “Harvard’s outstanding [1941] graduate,” endowed with “name, wealth and brains.” The godson of FDR, Marvin had played an important role in the war managing the air shipment of strategic imports. After the war, Marvin became an important public advocate of air transportation, but he enjoyed his pleasures as much as Jack. Marvin presumably knew that his dissembling this weekend was not just for Jackie but also for a public that would not look kindly on this most blessed of married men having a romp among the women whom Marvin had so graciously assembled.

Jack was on crutches, and he should have been thinking of anything but embellishing his sexual reputation. This weekend was little more than a consolation prize. Since March he had been writing Gunilla seeking to set up a rendezvous with her in the summer. His letter that month was doubly circumspect. He subtly reminded Gunilla of their meeting as if she might have
forgotten (“Do you remember our dinner and evening together this summer at Antibes and Cagnes?”). As his return address, he gave his aide Ted Reardon’s Georgetown home.

When Gunilla responded positively to his entreaties, Jack aggressively raised the stakes. He told her that he was willing to come to Sweden to meet her in August, but that was not his preference. “I thought I might get a boat and sail around the Mediterranean for two weeks—with you as crew,” Jack wrote her. Gunilla tentatively agreed to see him in Paris, but he kept pushing her to go off on a private cruise. He was so sick, however, that in September 1954 he had to cable her: LEG INJURED AND HOSPITALIZED TRIP POSTPONED WILL WRITE MANY REGRETS JOHN.

Jack was so weak that he could not even attend the sailboat races but instead had to watch them on land sitting in a chair, observing the finish line with binoculars. That did not prevent him from more vigorous nocturnal activities that attracted the prurient attention of Mrs. Kelly, who oversaw activities at the Old Kimball House, where the group was staying. The maids started spending more time examining Jack’s sheets than changing them. Marvin thought that hotel personnel were listening in on phone conversations.

As good fortune would have it, Mrs. Kelly was Catholic. Marvin and his friends decided that Jack would have to take the good lady to mass. “We plopped him into a bathtub of cold water, got him down to the lobby,” Marvin recalled. “There was Mrs. Kelly with her car in the driveway. After that, no espionage, no gossip, full security, full cooperation.”

J
ack had what in many ways was an aristocratic conception of life. He identified with Cecil’s Melbourne and the young lord’s “Renaissance ideal of the whole man, whose aspiration it is to make the most of every advantage, intellectual and sensual, that life has to offer.” He could be acerbic about his déclassé fellow citizens, but such views were anathema in his egalitarian nation, doubly so in a politician seeking the votes of many people he thought well beneath him.

Down in Palm Beach over the Christmas holiday, Jack read Cecil’s new biography of the adult Melbourne,
Lord M. or The Later Life of Lord Melbourne,
a companion volume to the biography of young Melbourne that he had admired so much as a young man. Then he had read those eloquent pages portraying a dispassionate, elegant, hedonistic, young aristocrat who was the model of what he himself aspired to be. Now he read about a Melbourne who came as close to a portrait of what he had become as anything else he was likely to have read.

Even as prime minister, Melbourne had a temperament that was “all salt and sunshine. The world might be a futile place, but how odd it was, how fascinating, how endlessly full of interest! By now he had acquired the skill of a life-long hedonist in extracting every drop of pleasure from life that it had to offer…. A cynic who loved mankind, a skeptic who found life thoroughly worth living, he contrived to face the worthlessness of things, cheerfully enough.”

This Melbourne was as wearily aware of the sheer futility of most human endeavor as he had been as a young man. Yet as prime minister he became one of the great leaders of his time, and a gracious mentor to the young Queen Victoria. He loved the ladies still and was named a correspondent in a famous divorce case, a charge that he beat, as he did any challenge to his honor.

Jack loved to read the story of Melbourne and other richly ornate tales of European history. Like Melbourne, he had an aristocratic conception of marriage. His was not a middle-class union in which adultery was a crime against the human trust that held the couple together during the ceaseless competition and uncertainties of life. Nor did he hold the bourgeois illusion that a mere marriage saved one from the essential isolation of life. He did not give all of himself to Jackie in part because all of himself could not be given. He had his own world-weary sense of men and women and their perpetual games. That he lay in bed reading
Lord M.
and thinking occasionally of sweet Gunilla in Sweden did not mean that he was unhappy with his wife or thought his marriage a failure.

David Cecil’s book may well have been what set him to musing, scribbling notes that he surely meant only for himself. He was an American senator, but he wrote that he preferred reading European history. It was “more interesting because of [the] leisure class.” American history was the “struggle to survive” and “except on Western frontier [was] not glamorous.” European women were interesting because they were “women of leisure.” As for American women, they were “either prostitutes or housewives … [and did] not play much of a role in culture or intellectual life of country.” The “Civil War [was] glamorous … but only in Virginia because of remarkable personality of leaders.”

The Civil War may have been momentarily glamorous to a gallant young officer riding a thoroughbred steed alongside General Robert E. Lee, but hardly so for a tattered, barefoot Irish peasant walking behind in the dust with his rusty musket on his shoulder and hardtack in his kit. And that is where Jack’s ancestor would surely have been if he had fought for the Confederacy.

“Jack did have aristocratic instincts,” reflected his old friend Charley
Bartlett. Jack, however, was a self-conscious aristocrat, and a self-conscious aristocrat is no aristocrat at all. He knew—and this rankled enormously—that he still would not be welcome in such haunts of the Brahmin elite as Boston’s Somerset Club, as either a member or possibly even as a guest.

In these notes Jack pondered an essential contradiction in his own life and nature. If not for his father and the lessons of the war, he might have lived a life extreme only its pursuit of pleasure, as a snobbish dilettante, dipping into the arts, endlessly amusing himself. Even if Jack had wanted to live that sort of life, he realized that there was no stylish leísured society in America like the society he found so attractive in London.

Most of Jack’s contemporaries were fascinated by the lives of the most adventurous elements of the middle class or the working class. Jack, however, found that American history “tend[s] to lack romance and drama, except the romance and drama that can be found in the story of a people and a country expanding from a beachhead to the most powerful nation on earth.” For him, American political history was in part a dreary business, unlike European history, with its grand, gaudy aristocratic lives that from a distance appeared “bright with color and romance” against a gray background of the “squalor and quiet desperation” in which the masses existed.

Worldly upper-class women, especially Europeans, intrigued Jack. Even his own wife, as sophisticated as Jackie was, had a girlish, unformed quality and could not compare with the great ladies of the past. He could applaud the virtue and achievements of such exemplary American women as Jane Addams or Susan B. Anthony, but he would have preferred to have the Marquise de Pompadour or Catherine the Great as his dinner companion.

In private, Jack placed a higher value on wit than virtue, cleverness than sincerity. At times he could hardly tolerate the relentless industriousness of American life, a philosophy encapsulated for him in Longfellow’s words: “Life is real! Life is earnest!/And the grave is not its goal.” He much preferred the European view of Lord Byron, who, while willing to die for Greek freedom, would have wanted to do it in a properly cut coat. Jack could quote approvingly Lord Byron’s axiom: “Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,/Sermons and soda water the day after.”

Scribbling his notes in Palm Beach, Jack wrote that as bad as American women were, politicians were their equals, “rather pompous,” their “humor unsophisticated.” What was impressive about them was “the vituperation that surrounds them on the floor of Senate, in newspapers etc.”

Jack occasionally revealed his disdain for many of his colleagues among trusted friends, blasting all the cant and stupidity that swirled around him in a cathartic purging. On one of his trips a few years later, he was flying with Ben Bradlee of
Newsweek
and Chalmers Roberts of the
Washington Post
when he set off on one of his minor rants, calling Senator Stuart Symington “Stubum” and deriding the elegant Missouri politician as little more than a well-dressed fool. If a word of what Roberts considered Jack’s “gratuitous insult” had gotten out, Jack would have unnecessarily made a new enemy, even if the Washington cognoscenti chuckled at the accuracy of his invective. But it did not get out because Jack, like Bobby, had a sixth sense about which journalists could be trusted.

There were moments, though, when another Jack Kennedy rose from his seat, a man imbued with the highest aspirations of his office. In his first term in the Senate, he did few things as memorable as his speech on Vietnam in April 1954. Everything he said that day could have been extrapolated from what he had seen and felt three years before on his trip to Asia. But he said it now on the floor of the Senate, his words unparsed by expediency, his logic true, and his words audacious in their implications. He saw that in Vietnam there was no possibility of preventing a Communist takeover unless the French granted a subject people their independence. He was in favor of the $400 million aid program only if the French worked toward ending their colonial regime.

“I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people,” he told the Senate. “Moreover, without political independence for the Associated States [Vietnam], the other Asiatic nations have made it clear that they regard this as a war of colonialism; and the ‘united action’ which is said to be so desperately needed for victory in that area is likely to end up as unilateral action by our own country.”

After the fall of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, the French settled for an ignominious peace that split Vietnam in two, with Ho Chi Minh in the North believing that he had won only half a victory, and the South left a dissident, troubled land riven with all the scars of colonization.