The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (104 page)

These grand ceremonial functions were not simply trifling asides to the business of government, but symbols of the nation’s greatness. And never in American history had they been carried out with such grace and elegance. The most memorable gift the president gave each visiting head of state was the event itself, symbolizing in its uniqueness a detailed concern for that nation and its leader.

In July the state dinner for President Mohammad Ayub Khan of Pakistan took place at George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, the guests arriving down the Potomac River by boat. Although most commentators celebrated the event, some critics complained about Americans honoring this heathen and his entourage by drinking gin and tonics on Washington’s grave. Those who criticized the exquisite party and said it was a wasteful extravagance could not have imagined that forty years later the evening would still be remembered in Pakistan and America while the issues discussed between the two presidents had long been forgotten.

These White House evenings had become the best parties in America. Jackie was the beautiful hostess of these events, blessing them with her elegance. There was good wine and quick wit. The guest lists were eclectic, including business leaders and artists, philanthropists and athletes, politicians and authors.

Kennedy clearly understood the political advantages of being seen as a benefactor of the arts, and he had the intellectual integrity to honor not just those who served his party or his ambition but also those who served the high truths of their art. In November 1961, he invited the incomparable Spanish cellist Pablo Casals to dinner at the White House. Casals had stopped playing publicly as a protest against the fascist Franco who held his beloved Spain in bondage.

Great artists and great art do not serve the state and might indeed be seen as dangerous, even subversive. “We believe that an artist, in order to be true to himself and his work, must be a free man,” Kennedy said that evening. He invited Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer, for his own evening, Andre Malraux, the French novelist, for a different event, and on another inspiring evening all the Nobel Prize winners in the Western Hemisphere. He resurrected the Presidential Medal of Freedom so that he and his administration could celebrate accomplished Americans for their contributions not to him and his administration but to American life and culture.

The
Washington Star
reported that “for the first time in almost 50 years, Washington has no wealthy extrovert with social position who can rightfully claim the local title of society queen. The truth of the matter is that the nation’s first lady … actually is the town’s best party giver.” The president and first lady were the progenitors of a new kind of Washington social life. The very society that had spurned Kennedy’s parents and that he had been groomed to enter was beginning to die. In Washington it was the beginning of an era when achievement and celebrity brought one to the head of the list, not lineage and formal manners.

The president and first lady consciously celebrated what was best in American life, in antiques and music, in art and food. They signaled that this
nation of nations should celebrate its freedoms and diversity not merely in speeches but in its culture. Jackie was a true admirer of the arts, and her husband rightfully deferred to her in these matters, enjoying credit for a taste that was largely his wife’s.

The president was no more the creator of this immense opening up of the American spirit than he was of the other social movements sweeping the world. But he identified with it, even though there were potential political costs in doing so. Freedom was dangerous, and a man who chose his own church and his own faith might choose none at all, or mindless nihilism, or despair. As for cultural pursuits, many Americans viewed fine art, fine foods, and fine objects apprehensively, as if their passionate pursuit suggested an effete, un-American quality.

The Kennedys promoted cultural and social events as if without them life was only partially lived. They made the White House the nation’s model of taste, the celebrant of American culture. Kennedy’s critics would later suggest that this was nothing more than gauze over the camera, softening the harsh lines by which his actions deserved to be viewed. It was all, they sniffed, a triumph of style over substance. The Kennedys’ achievement was to turn style into substance and to celebrate the opening up of broad new cultural and social vistas that would never again be shut down. Unlike any administration since, the Kennedys turned the White House into an inspiring symbol of culture and style without equal.

K
ennedy’s style, substance, and savvy came together in his televised press conferences. Since the Kennedy years, presidents have learned to squeeze all the juices of spontaneity out of their media conferences, but Kennedy was the first president to give regular, live, televised press conferences. At the time it seemed a daring departure from the controlled appearances of previous occupants of the Oval Office.

Kennedy had a bemused way of looking out on the assembled press as if no one in Christendom, and certainly not his aides, could ever imagine what questions he might be asked. He played on the reporters, knowing those who wanted their moment of preening time on television, those who had serious questions, and those who had a special cause or area that they always asked about. He used his disarming wit and grace to turn back the more mean-spirited questions on the reporters who asked them. He was at his best, however, when he was asked philosophical questions, the ones he could answer by expressing the existential dilemma of a president dependent on aides and officials and yet standing alone, responsible for his own hard judgments.

“Well, I think in the first place the problems are more difficult than I had
imagined they were,” he said when asked after two years how his experiences had matched his expectations.

Secondly, there is a limitation upon the ability of the United States to solve these problems … and I think that is probably true of anyone who becomes president, because there is such a difference between those who advise or speak or legislate and … the man who must select from the various alternatives proposed and say that this shall be the policy of the United States. It is much easier to make the speeches than it is to finally make the judgments, because unfortunately your advisers are frequently divided. If you take the wrong course, and on occasion I have, the president bears the burden of the responsibly quite rightly. The advisers may move on to new advice.

Kennedy looked at everything in his life through the prism of politics, not only the most monumental questions of life and death and the endless array of issues, from civil rights to education, but even the smallest social events and the media coverage of his children. The photo spreads, be they of the children or Jackie or the loving family at play, enhanced his popularity, spilling over onto his political image. He pushed Caroline and John Jr. forward to be photographed by the popular magazines
Look
and
Life,
an enterprise that was immensely profitable to their owners and may well have subtly tempered some of their political criticism. Jackie tried to shelter her children from the flashbulbs and the public’s preening obsession, but the president always managed to work around her. As soon as his wife left Washington, it was not only other women who entered the White House to amuse the president but at times photographers to capture images of his children.

A political architect of the emerging media society, Kennedy created a model that his successors would try unsuccessfully to match. He did not believe, as some would have, that image was everything, but he did think of image as a kind of costuming that allowed him to walk where he wanted to walk and to do what he wanted to do. More than any previous president, his wife and family were portrayed extensively and lovingly in the social pages of the newspapers, the back-of-the-book coverage in the news weeklies, and elaborate spreads in the women’s magazines and on such television programs as Jackie’s spectacularly successful tour of the newly restored White House in February 1962, watched by forty-six million Americans.

With this kind of coverage, Kennedy did not have to worry about carping journalists who thought it was their professional obligation to attack him. This was not a trifling business to him, and he negotiated over the filming of his children and his wife’s program as if an important treaty were at stake. The danger
was that such coverage risked trivializing his presidency, turning him into a star and denying him the natural gravitas of his office.

A week after Jackie’s tour of the White House, the president had another splendid triumph when the astronaut John H. Glenn Jr. spun around the world three times in America’s first orbital space flight. On the morning when Glenn was being picked up from the tranquil waters of the Bahamas, however, the president was in a foul mood. He was sitting at his desk reading
Time
when he called Hugh Sidey, the magazine’s White House correspondent, into his office.

“Where did you get this goddamn item about me posing in this suit for
Gentleman’s Quarterly?”
Kennedy asked, throwing his copy of
Time
on the desk. Sidey fancied himself a serious reporter who had nothing to do with the trivia that sometimes found its way into the back of his magazine. He had no idea that Kennedy’s press secretary had allowed the
Gentleman’s Quarterly
photographer to represent his pool photo as an exclusive, and that
Time
was merely reprinting it.

“I … I … I don’t know, Mr. President,” Sidey stuttered. “I’ll try to find out.”

That was the stock answer that Kennedy heard too many times a day. He came around from the back of the desk and shook his fist in Sidey’s face. “You sons of bitches are out to get me,” Kennedy said, his face red and distorted. “You do this stuff, this personal stuff, as much as you can. You’re out to discredit me. People are remembered in this life for only one thing. They remember Coolidge because he appeared in that Indian war bonnet. They remember Arthur Godfrey because he buzzed the tower at Teterboro Airport. They’ll remember me as the man who posed for this.”

Kennedy would have raged on indefinitely, but Tazewell Shepard, the naval aide, gently injected himself to tell the president that Glenn had been picked up and was on the line. “Sidey, you son of a bitch, stand there and see if you can get this right.

“Oh, Colonel Glenn, what a great day!” Kennedy said into the phone as if all morning he had been waiting for this moment.

Sidey might be invited into the Oval Office for both exclusive interviews and condemnation, but no journalist in Washington was closer to the president than Joseph Alsop. Even though Kennedy had known Alsop for years as a social friend, the columnist had the audacity to write the president-elect saying that he viewed Kennedy’s election with “mixed feelings.” Instead of being angry at what others would have considered an intolerable impudence, Kennedy brilliantly co-opted the columnist. It proved to be among the most useful of the president’s many seductions. Alsop turned his column into a bully pulpit for the administration and used his considerable social power to
advance Kennedy. Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, a connoisseur of power, watched on with admiration at the way the president led Alsop away from the paths of journalistic righteousness and turned him into his steward and shill. “Kennedy used Joe,” reflected Galbraith. “Joe assembled the Washington establishment for Kennedy. He convened them for Kennedy.”

Most of his life Kennedy had striven to be part of the upper-class, old-line Protestant world that Alsop so perfectly exemplified. The president and first lady were regular guests at dinner parties at Alsop’s splendid Georgetown home, but even now the columnist needed to display his supposed social superiority. To Alsop, the stiletto of class was a shiv always ready to be drawn, in a quick feint invisible to the untrained eye. He used it eclectically and was perfectly willing to stick it into the president of the United States.

Proud vintner that he was, Alsop brought forth precious bottles of 1945 Chateau Lafite Rothschild. The wine, as Alsop would be glad to tell you, was clearly too tannic to be drunk and needed years more in the cellar to be worthy of its heritage. Alsop noted that the hapless man who was his president paid more attention to reading the label than to tasting the wine. Alsop would have been better off filling the bottle with
vin ordinaire
and recorking it than to waste his prized vintage on Kennedy.

This was a modern version of the fairy tale of the princess who, when asked to sleep on a mattress under which has been placed a pea, passes a restless and sleepless night, thereby proving her noble blood. Kennedy, as Alsop saw him, would have slept through the night. Although Alsop was probably correct that the president could not taste the subtle nuances, it is also possible that he thought the celebrated wine tasted like undrinkable swill but in deference to his host drank it down.

A
lthough Kennedy had his own friends in journalism, Bobby played an instrumental role, monitoring the press, doing whatever he could to see to it that the Kennedys were portrayed in the most admirable of terms. For the most part this was not an onerous task. Many of Washington’s premier journalists were eager collaborators, as much the seducers as the seduced. These reporters rationalized that they were advancing a desirable political agenda, but what they were advancing for the most part were their own careers.

The Kennedys liked to create a collegial relationship with those who wrote about them, so that the author and the subject seemed to be working together, like two artists painting the same portrait. After writing a draft of his classic book
The Making of the President 1960,
Theodore White sent the
manuscript to Bobby that he said was “full of errors … but also full of affection and respect.”

“Do keep this as a personal document for your eyes alone,” the journalist wrote. White doubtless would not have sent the manuscript to Bobby if it had been less than brimming with what he called “affection and respect.” Bobby, for his part, did not attempt to paint a thick coating of pastels over any harsh coloring. He was smart enough to write only narrow, fact-based criticisms, telling White that he “would be delighted to discuss” larger matters of emphasis on some occasion.