American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) (16 page)

Although Susan Mary was not as intimate with the presidential couple as her husband was and viewed every dinner as a hurdle to be cleared, the close relationship with the Kennedys pleased her as much as it did Joe. She would never have admitted to pride,
however, and merely said how grateful she was to be able, from time to time, to take the president’s mind off his heavy responsibilities. John Kennedy probably never tried to seduce Susan Mary—too proper and starched—but he was friendly and attentive. Both loved history, particularly dramatic events and remarkable figures. “You were very good this evening,” said Joe, satisfied by his wife’s success, “but stop talking only about serious matters and David Cecil’s books. Tell him who’s sleeping with whom, he loves that.” Neither Joe nor Susan Mary had the faintest inkling about Kennedy’s secret life.

One evening was special. On October 16, 1962,
¹³
the Alsops had organized a farewell dinner for Avis and Chip Bohlen, who had just been appointed ambassador to France. The Grahams and Isaiah Berlin had been invited as well as Hervé Alphand, the French ambassador (in spite of Joe’s grumbling). It was a mild evening. Kennedy and Chip strolled and chatted beneath the magnolia trees for so long that the lamb went cold. When the president finally came to the table, Susan Mary felt she was sitting next to a motor running at full speed. He was exceptionally energetic, yet he kept his usual calm and controlled voice as he repeatedly asked Bohlen and Berlin how Russians behave when they are cornered.

“Something is going on,” said Susan Mary to Joe on her way to bed.

“You think so? Good night, darling. It was a great party.”

She was right. That very morning the president had been shown aerial photographs of Cuba, which proved that the Soviets, contrary to their denials, were installing missile bases within striking distance of the United States. The worst crisis of the cold war was about to begin.

The Alsops were also friendly with the president’s men. Kennedy had attracted people from various social backgrounds, political affiliations, and areas of expertise who shared a love for their leader and a taste for action. They were often academics, intellectuals who enjoyed exerting power. They had their sights fixed on China and the Soviet Union, and although they knew that nuclear apocalypse could strike at any moment, the threat of annihilation only added to the thrill of the job. Hardened by the Second World War in which they had served under the generals they were now shunting into retirement, they dreamed of defeating international Communism, a menace that seemed to lie in wait everywhere they turned. Like Kennedy, these cowboys of the atomic age worked hard and played harder. The ones closest to Joe were the national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy; Bundy’s second in command, Walt W. Rostow; the president’s brother-in-law, Sargeant Shriver; and Lawrence O’Brien, a political mastermind who handled relations with Congress. There was also Arthur Schlesinger, an old friend of Joe’s whom Kennedy had stolen away from Adlai Stevenson and Harvard and entrusted with an undefined and glamorous job at the White House.

Joe and Susan Mary also often saw Bobby and Ethel Kennedy. While Susan Mary certainly raised an eyebrow at facetious Ethel, who was known to have pushed a fully clothed guest into the swimming pool, she admired the struggle against segregation that Bobby led as attorney general. In June 1963, the Alsops spent an evening with Bobby aboard the presidential yacht, the
Honey Fitz
, where Susan Mary met Nicholas Katzenbach, Bobby’s deputy, a man she immediately liked.

“Tell me about what happened the other day with Wallace,” she said.

“Are you sure you really want to know?”
¹⁴

Because she insisted, he told her how he had stood up to Governor George Wallace, who had physically blocked two black students from entering the University of Alabama. The confrontation had been caught on film. After seeing the clip on June 11, the president followed Bobby’s advice and gave a televised speech on civil rights the same evening. Susan Mary found the speech excellent, and hoped that the antisegregation law proposed by the president would make it through Congress. She also kept informed on the issue through leaders of the black community, like Martin Luther King Jr., who came to Dumbarton Avenue that summer—one marked by a wave of riots and demonstrations. On August 28, she watched King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on television and thought it equal to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

The 1960s were Georgetown’s glory years. Ever since the New Deal, Washington’s oldest neighborhood had been the center of American power and the seat of an intellectual and social elite that had chosen to serve the nation. Diplomats, politicians, journalists, senior CIA officials: they all had attended the same schools and universities and had enlisted to fight in the cold war. In spite of their anti-Communist views, they were opposed to McCarthy’s methods and demagoguery. They formed a friendly network with its own rituals: Sunday night suppers, dance classes, and, during the early postwar years, cooking classes for the women and Joe. Together, they brunched and played tennis, drank cocktails and spent weekends in the country: social life was
but an extension of work. Politics, particularly foreign policy, was the only real subject of conversation, and it was analyzed and picked apart around the dinner table, accompanied by side dishes of jokes, anecdotes, gossip, and speculation. Joe loved getting into arguments and could be depended on to shout down his opponents. After dinner, he would take the men to the garden room for brandy and cigars. Leaning forward, elbows on knees, he would listen for a while, then jump in. “What are we going to do about the massive increase of the Russian arsenal?” He would clear his throat and launch into a speech while the ash from his cigarette fell unheeded to the marble floor.

Susan Mary had no trouble fitting into this patrician world, which felt passionate about the public good. She may have seemed exotic, with her Parisian air and unremitting elegance, but she liked walking at a fast pace and winning at tennis, and she understood that parties were the evening side of political life. She knew the job; she was a Jay by birth and an Alsop by marriage—she took a prominent place in the firmament and remained there to the end.

During the gilded Kennedy era, Joe and Susan Mary’s circle grew remarkably in influence and prestige. “What does Georgetown think?” the White House had taken to asking. Although some friends, like Frank Wisner and Dick Bissell, stopped working for the CIA, the former for health reasons and the latter because he was deemed responsible for the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, others had taken important jobs in diplomacy or advising the president. This was the case with Dean Acheson, Chip Bohlen, Paul Nitze, and Averell Harriman. Journalist friends included Phil Graham, Joseph
Kraft, and the attractive Ben Bradlee. It was a good time to be a journalist. Unlike Eisenhower, Kennedy liked the press and had told his staff to give easy access.

All of Joe’s wishes seemed to be coming true. Thanks to his social standing and Roosevelt connections, he had always been close to power, which he usually respected, not out of awe but because its goals seemed noble. In his view, the position he held was beneficial to his work. Readers could be sure that his facts—he prided himself on offering facts, not mere commentary—came from the best sources. Under Kennedy, Joe felt he had truly entered the engine room of American politics. From the 1960 election onward, he was asked for advice on cabinet appointments. Even though Dean Rusk would get the job of secretary of state over Joe’s candidate, David Bruce, Joe still had the impression that he had been responsible for Douglas Dillon’s appointment as secretary of the Treasury. A friendly rapport developed between Joe and his president. Crises were happening all the time, and this made things all the more exciting. The president would confide in Joe, hinting at the difficulties of his June 1961 meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna or at his stormy relationship with the French president. They would discuss the matter and Joe would give Kennedy his point of view. “Mr. President, you’ve got to understand, independence is like a religion to General de Gaulle.” After going on assignment abroad, Joe would report to the White House. In the fall of 1963, just back from Saigon, he spoke at length of the need to make changes to Ngo Dinh Diem’s government. Kennedy patiently listened to Joe’s tirades and fiery exhortations because he appreciated his friend’s discretion and absolute loyalty.

However special, Kennedy’s treatment of Joe was not unique. Other important columnists, like Walter Lippman, thought by many to be the greatest of all, or the
New York Times
’
James Reston, were also courted and consulted by the president. These connections helped neutralize criticism, amplify successes, and facilitate leaks. Nobody seemed to mind the symbiotic relationship the presidency had with the press. All the same, Joe’s brother Stewart had chosen to keep his distance in hopes of maintaining, as he put it, a clearer judgment.

Two weeks before the trip to Texas in November 1963, Joe and Susan Mary dined at the Kennedy White House for the last time. The president asked his wife to show their friends the pink suit she was planning to wear in Dallas. Joe and Susan Mary wished them luck. Visiting a Southern state would be no easy task for a president who had shown support for civil rights.

On the cold gray afternoon of Friday, November 22, 1963, Susan Mary was lunching alone in her study because Joe had a guest. Being kept away was an unpleasant but inevitable situation to which she had grown accustomed. There was a knock on her door. “Come quick. Somebody shot the president!” She hurried to the radio and heard the news. Joe had to be told.

Joe sat, still and silent, alone in his little sitting room. The telephone kept ringing. Susan Mary picked it up. It was Jock Whitney, the owner of the
New York Herald Tribune,
begging Joe to write a piece. “Tell him I can’t. I don’t have anything to say,” whispered Joe. John Kenneth Galbraith came after dinner and told them with great feeling that none of Kennedy’s team wanted to work for Johnson. Finally, in the middle of the night, Joe managed to write a farewell column titled “Go, Stranger!” He
and Susan Mary spent Saturday at the White House, Susan Mary lending a hand where she could and Joe trying to convince his friends to stay on with the new president. On Sunday night, Jackie called Susan Mary, making sure that the invitations for the funeral Mass the next day had arrived. Joe took the telephone and suggested she come and live with them until a new house was found. This made Jackie regain her normal voice for a moment and almost laugh. “Joe, dear Joe, do you realize that the children and I have nine dogs between us?”
¹⁵
The ceremony was held on Monday morning at Saint Matthew’s Cathedral. Susan Mary would always remember Joe’s terrible silence and the look on Bobby Kennedy’s face.

“I had no idea that I loved him,” wrote Joe years later. “I don’t go in for loving men. But nothing in my life has moved me as it did, not even the death of my father. And everyone has said the same. As though he were the one thing we most valued and could never replace.”
¹⁶

“Yes, you’re right, it’s been hardest on the men,” wrote Susan Mary to Avis Bohlen.
¹⁷
Always wanting to make herself useful, she spent long weeks in the basement of the Old State Department with her sister-in-law Tish Alsop and a group of diplomats’ wives, answering thousands of letters of condolence that flooded in from all over the world.

Quagmire

In the end, Joe’s friends Bundy, Dillon, McNamara, and Salinger all decided to serve the new president, a man they had politely ignored during the years he had been, in title, second in command.
Joe knew Johnson as a matter of course, and immediately sent a letter expressing his trust and support. On Monday, November 25, he called him on the telephone. Both men were versed in the art of flattery and manipulation and wanted to come to an understanding that would benefit America’s best interests.

So it was that Joe and Susan Mary continued to go to the White House. In May 1964, Susan Mary was invited to tea with a group of people from the artistic world. Mrs. Johnson was wearing her prettiest afternoon dress and wanted to show that she was capable of following in Jackie Kennedy’s footsteps. Still, the style had changed, becoming “most curious and interesting.”
¹⁸
“They entertain in a warm, Texan way,” recounted Susan Mary after dining with the Johnsons. “I’m growing rather fond of Ladybird, but what about those macabre daughters, Lucybird and Lindabird? They generally wear sequined black slacks and slip up to one just as Mac Bundy is beginning to spill the beans about something interesting, twist one’s ear, and say ‘You’re right cute, Mrs. Alsop, want to hear what my English teacher said today?’”
¹⁹
Another time, the president of the United States pinched her behind and exclaimed for all to hear, “Why does such a thin girl wear a garter belt?”
²⁰

In June, the Alsops dined with the Johnsons and their close friends Clark Clifford, Jack Valenti, and their wives. It was a pleasant evening—the heavy summer humidity had not set in yet—so they took a stroll on the South Lawn. Susan Mary noticed a black suitcase the size of a large radio being carried around by two strapping secret security officers and wondered with curiosity if it was
the
button. A hundred feet away, the men were discussing Vietnam.

Joe’s opinion on Vietnam was in line with his beliefs about the global war against Communism. He felt America had obligations toward South Vietnam, a small, fragile state deserving foreign assistance. He also felt strongly about the danger of Communism spreading in Southeast Asia, all the more as China had already fallen in 1949. At the time, Joe had criticized the United States for letting China go, and now, according to him, the situation in Vietnam required vigorous action. It was a matter of honor and prestige, not to mention America’s position in Asia and the world in general. Joe had returned from Vietnam in May 1964 and sounded a rallying cry, but it was an election year, and Johnson did not want to show his hand or be pushed into engagement. In December, Joe went back to Saigon and became even more alarmed. He started making comparisons to Kennedy’s behavior during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which annoyed the president. For Joe, the stakes and the solution were the same as they had been in Cuba: America had to deploy force and use it, if necessary. Courage and virility were called for. Cunningly, Joe played on Johnson’s fear of appearing weak in the eyes of history, and his loud editorials maintained pressure.