Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy (41 page)

Yeah. Oh, the President did feel that if Rockefeller had gotten the nomination in 1960, he would have been elected. I think that's right.

And he said, you know, he just didn't have the—I don't know whether it was gumption or judgment or just timid soul, or something. And of course, now the poor man's doing it all with completely the wrong sense of timing. And, I don't think he thought very much of Rockefeller, but he didn't really say anything mean against him. He didn't like Nixon and he really thought he was dangerous. You know, and that he was a little bit—

I thought he was sick.

Sick, yeah.
⁷³

Scranton?

Well, I don't remember talking with him about Scranton.
⁷⁴
You know, he was sort of coming up, and I suppose he thought he might have had it. But I never can remember talking to him—

Did he look forward to the '64 campaign?

Oh, yes. And I looked forward to it so much. It was one you could do together. Campaigning's so different when you're President. It wouldn't be those awful things of plodding through Wisconsin, forcing somebody to shake hands with you. I mean, he really looked forward to it, and then to winning and then to just sort of solidifying. You know, he really did so much. There wasn't that much more to do, except it would have jelled. And it would have been relations with other countries. I mean, it would have been Latin America and with Russia and de Gaulle never would have recognized Red China, and all of that—if he'd stayed alive.

Did he ever talk with regard to the Russian trip about anything particularly he wanted to see or do?

Just that there would be the most fantastic crowds.

Did he—was it just Moscow or would it—

I think it was just a Russian trip. You know, he never really went into it. And, oh, what did he say? When things got nicer about Khrushchev, you know, after the détente
⁷⁵
and everything, he always used to say—well, remember what he said after Vienna, that he really is a gangster, and so everybody mustn't get deluded. But if you deal with him out of firmness—it's different. But he never wanted people to think that now Khrushchev is the sweet, benign, undangerous person.

Did he ever talk about his letters, his correspondence with Khrushchev?
⁷⁶

Well, just that there was one. But he never told me what. I didn't ask him what was in them. If I'd asked, I could have seen them, because every time I'd ask about something like that he'd say, "Get Bundy to show you." Bundy did, and for a couple of months there, Bundy was sending me all the intelligence—top briefings and everything. And then finally, I got so bored—no, not bored, discouraged—reading them. I said, "Please, never send me another." And when I'd read those things which Jack had to flip through every day, I didn't see how he could be so cheerful at night, or have a drink or go out on the
Honey Fitz
. He'd just read twenty pages of problems. And then I thought, "Well, I'd better not read them anymore, because I can just read the good things and be in a good mood for him." And I remember we gave a little dinner—farewell, for Ros Gilpatric, and Mrs. Gilpatric was saying to Jack all through it—it was the TFX time—"I say to Ros when he comes home every night, How can they say those things about you? Aren't they all awful?'"
⁷⁷
And he said to her, "My God, you don't say that to your husband when he comes home at night, do you? That's not what you should do. Find one good thing they say, say, Isn't that great?' or bring up something else that will make him happy." And so, that's how I sensed what he wanted me to be, and that's really when I stopped reading all those briefings and things, because I didn't want to have to worry about anything. I wanted to, sort of, take your cue from him and—

One of the greatest gifts was his capacity to switch from one thing to another and not be nagged at by problems, to put them aside knowing that he can't do anything more at that moment about them and not let them worry him.

And that's—did I ever tell you about him making me move my desk?

No.

Well, I used to have my desk in the West Sitting Hall, where we always sat, and it would be piled high—and especially when Tish was always sending in those damn folders. Just when you'd be sitting happily with Jack, some other messenger would come running in, I think—and he said, "Move your desk out." I knew I did tell you this.

You told this. Yes.

Down to the Treaty Room. Well, and I couldn't get problems off. But he could always go to sleep, too, which I thought was so important. He didn't have this in—you know, he could just turn it off. And I always thought one thing, and I think it's true of Lyndon Johnson, and I think it might have been true of Adlai Stevenson. That these things get on you and on you and there's indecision or something—and you can't sleep. You really become—I always thought any president would become an insomniac. But Jack had this built-in thing that Ted Reardon
⁷⁸
told me about before—like soldiers in a foxhole. When it was time to go to sleep, he just could. And that was one of his greatest—it was fortunate he had that. That's about all.

[John enters the room and plays with tape recorder]

THE PRESIDENT AND FIRST LADY, WASHINGTON, D.C., MAY 3, 1961
Stanley Tretick/BettmannCORBIS/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

NOTES

1
. In early 1963, Schlesinger had pleaded with the President to tape his own reminiscences after "major episodes." But with the exception of dictating an occasional memo for the record, Kennedy had declined. Schlesinger did not learn until 1982 that, in the summer of 1962, JFK had started discreetly taping hundreds of hours of his White House meetings and telephone calls. Even this collection covered only a small fraction of the conversations in which the President did business.

2
. Decades later, after her death, the phenomenon persisted. Half a million people flocked to the Metropolitan Museum in New York to view the first public exhibition of Jacqueline's White House wardrobe.

3
. JFK sardonically quipped that the rescue of Lafayette Park "may be the only monument we'll leave." In October 1963, expanding the case into a general principle, he declared while dedicating a library to Robert Frost at Amherst College that he looked forward to an America "which will preserve great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past."

4
. For her family's flight to England for the Queen's ceremony in 1965, President Johnson offered a presidential aircraft. Remembering her
Air Force One
journey back from Dallas, Jacqueline wrote LBJ that she did not know "if I could steel myself to go on one of those planes again." Nevertheless, to honor her husband, she would accept: "But please do not let it be Air Force One. And please, let it be the 707 that looks least like Air Force One inside." In 1968, before boarding a presidential jet taking Robert Kennedy's casket from Los Angeles to New York, she demanded to be reassured that it was not the
Air Force One
of 1963. Though afflicted until the end of her life by such painful sensitivities, Jacqueline was blessed with loving and protective children. Once when John was reading a children's volume about his father, he called out, "Close your eyes, Mummy!" and tore out a photograph of the presidential car in Dallas before showing her the book.

1
. A
DLAI
E
WING
S
TEVENSON
(1900–1965) was governor of Illinois from 1949 to 1953 and Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956. At the 1956 Democratic convention in Chicago, Stevenson unexpectedly broke tradition by allowing the delegates to decide themselves who should be vice president. In the ensuing contest, JFK lost to Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver by a hairbreadth.

2
. J
OSEPH
P
ATRICK
K
ENNEDY
(1888–1969) was a financier, first chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission, pre–World War II ambassador to the Court of St. James's under President Franklin Roosevelt, and the father of nine children, including the thirty-fifth president of the United States. Jacqueline's comment refers to the senior Kennedy's insistence to several reporters in the late 1950s that he had originally decided that his first son, Joseph, Jr. (1915–1944), should one day be president, and that when Joe, Jr., was killed in World War II, he turned to Jack.

3
. R
OBERT
F
RANCIS
K
ENNEDY
(1925–1968) was the fifth of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's nine children, a lawyer, Senate committee counsel, and manager of his brother's 1960 campaign, after which the President-elect made him attorney general. Despite his formal mandate to run the Justice Department, as his brother's presidency unfolded, RFK served as his chief adviser and enforcer on virtually all matters that faced him. In 1964, after his brother's death, RFK was elected senator from New York. Four years later, he was assassinated while running for the Democratic presidential nomination.

4
. T
HEODORE
S
ORENSEN
(1928–2010) was the son of Nebraska's progressive Danish-American attorney general and his Russian Jewish wife. Ted Sorensen joined JFK's staff in 1953 and, as a speechwriter, helped give the senator his voice, with the staccato phrases, contrapuntal phrasing, soaring rhetoric, and historical references so widely praised. Later, at the White House, Sorensen served as special counsel to the President. In the spring of 1956, Kennedy had him draft and circulate a memorandum that showed how many votes a Catholic running mate might bring to a Democratic ticket in 1956. (Since the 1928 landslide defeat of Al Smith, the only Catholic candidate ever chosen for a major-party ticket, many feared that Catholicism was a liability for a nominee.) But Mrs. Kennedy is correct that her husband did not overtly press Stevenson to put him on the ticket. When the Illinoisan made his unusual, surprise decision to throw open the nomination, and Kennedy made his hasty effort to win the prize, Joseph Kennedy, vacationing in Cap d'Antibes, was furious that his son would try something so ill planned. JFK later said he was glad that he lost, because when Stevenson was defeated by Dwight Eisenhower that fall, some Democrats might have pointed at his Catholic running mate.

5
. R
ICHARD
M
ILHOUS
N
IXON
(1913–1994) had served from 1947 to 1951 with JFK in the House, where they were cordial colleagues. Nixon was a senator from California when chosen by Dwight Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican ticket. On November 7, 1960, Vice President Nixon lost the presidency to Kennedy by the tiny margin of 112,827 popular votes. By "Nixon business," Schlesinger means conspicuous ambition.

6
. E
UNICE
M
ARY
K
ENNEDY
S
HRIVER
(1921–2009) was JFK's sister. In 1956, she was living in Chicago with her husband, Sargent Shriver, president of the city's Board of Education. Before her marriage, she had shared a townhouse with her brother in the Georgetown section of Washington. Tireless, greatly religious, Mrs. Shriver did pathbreaking work to bring the intellectually disabled into the mainstream and was always prodding Jack to do more to help the cause. (Their sister Rosemary [1918–2005] had been institutionalized in Wisconsin.) JFK indeed established the first presidential commission on mental retardation. Joseph Kennedy once said that had Eunice been a man, she might have been president.

7
. T
ORBERT
M
ACDONALD
(1917–1976) was a Kennedy chum, captain of the Harvard football team, and one of JFK's roommates at Harvard, who was married to Phyllis Brooks, a B-movie actress of the 1930s. He served as a Democratic member of Congress, representing Malden, Massachusetts, from 1954 until his death.