Kennedy: The Classic Biography (69 page)

RELAXATION

In a larger sense, the President’s office is wherever the President may be. For unlike the Congress and Supreme Court, the Presidency never recesses or adjourns. Unlike the arrangement in most departments and states, his absence from the country does not make his running mate Acting President. Wherever he went, Kennedy was linked by telephone to the White House switchboard, guarded by the Secret Service, and discreetly followed by one of an alternating team of Army warrant officers carrying in a slender black case the secret codes by which the Presidential order for nuclear retaliation would be given. Wherever he went, he received the same daily CIA briefing from a military or other aide and read most of the same daily newspapers, which were flown in to him if necessary. Wherever he went, he took with him the bulky black alligator briefcase he had carried since his first days in the House—the same bag he often took over to the Mansion in the evening—bulging with whatever he and his staff felt he needed to read by way of mail, magazines, books, briefing memos and assorted dispatches and documents. During absences of forty-eight hours or more, additional materials were flown to him regularly. Wherever he went, he kept in constant touch with Washington, signed bills and Executive Orders, and conferred on or contemplated current crises.

Despite these continuing burdens, a break in the routines helped prevent them from breaking him. The President thought it best for his family life and personal outlook to get away from the White House, when possible, for at least twenty-four hours on a weekend, for the whole weekend in the summer and for a longer holiday on occasion. In the summer, and occasionally in the fall, he traveled to his home at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, with additional visits to the summer home of his wife’s family in Newport, Rhode Island. (The persistent recurrence of weekend rain and fog at the Cape in 1961 brought on a debate, only partly humorous, between the First Lady and her father-in-law about whether the climates of the two communities differed.) In the winter and spring Palm Beach was the site for the longer stays; and for a brief weekend respite the Kennedys would sometimes use Camp David, the official Presidential retreat in the Maryland Hills, or the rented estate Glenora in the Virginia countryside. A home of their own in the same area was built in 1963.

During these family weekends the President, when it was time for play, could, whatever the strains of the moment, devote every inch of mind and body to leisure as intensively as he had to work, completely shaking off and shutting out the worries of the world beyond.

When at the seaside, he took long walks and swims, played with his children in the sand, devoured light as well as heavy reading and went boating with his father and family. He held to no official schedule, alternating work and play, reading and resting, talking to his children and talking to one of us on the telephone or in person. Occasionally I accompanied him to Cape Cod or Palm Beach for working weekends, and Salinger and a military aide always traveled with him on such trips. But, except for his daily briefings, he tried to keep Glenora and Camp David free from official visitors.

If we were working at Cape Cod he usually asked me to meet him at his house after church. Having changed into sport clothes, he would work over my latest draft or memorandum in his living room or on the back porch, usually smoking a cigar and sometimes, just before supper, drinking a daiquiri. On a very few occasions we worked during his daily boat ride, lunching on fish chowder and other preparations of the White House assistant chef, watching his wife water-ski, and lounging on the fantail talking in a lighthearted manner about people more than problems.

He relaxed best of all on the water. Although he sailed less frequently than he had in his younger days, and had perhaps forgotten the channels, judging from his embarrassment one day upon running aground on a sandbar, he loved the sea, as he had since childhood. (When he first sailed with his brother Joe, his father recalled, they were still “so small you couldn’t see their heads and it looked from the shore as if the boat were empty.”) On board either the family or Presidential cruiser, the President read history or biography or fiction, chatted with family and friends, waved at passing boats, watched local sailing races and enjoyed the distance between himself and the Secret Service. Birthday outings or weekends—his father’s, his wife’s, his children’s, his own—were very special, for the President could be quite sentimental about presents and reunions. At night he would watch a movie, though he was increasingly inclined to walk out on bad ones, and in Hyannis Port he would each weekend drive his children, and whichever of their twenty or so cousins were around, to the local candy shop.

Sundays included not only attending church but watching the political panel shows on television, as though he did not get his fill of that during the week. When I appeared at his request on
Meet the Press
at a delicate time—between the Cuban crisis and the 1962 election—the program had no sooner ended than the telephone rang in the studio. “They didn’t lay a glove on you,” said the President from Glenora.

When his back permitted, he played golf, often immediately upon arrival at whichever weekend home was near a course. Although neither his back nor his duties permitted much practice, he was a natural golfer and a good one, shooting in the low 80’s. Red Fay told of the game in May of 1960 at Cypress Point, California, when the candidate pleaded with a drive headed straight for the hole not to drop in. The publicity from a hole-in-one, he said, would not help a Democratic candidate at a time when Presidential golfing was a subject of not always friendly comment. He never used the putting green Eisenhower installed behind the White House, and was amused by the children’s forts dug in the sand trap and the toys planted near the cup. At least once, however, he was out in the back driving golf balls toward the Washington Monument.

His friends have related how he fancied himself to be Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer or some other professional champion whenever he swung a golf club (or Y. A. Tittle, the famed New York Giants quarterback, whenever he picked up a football). “He never started a game [of golf],” said British Ambassador David Ormsby-Gore, a frequent partner, “without working out a very complicated system of bets” in a discussion that usually lasted through the first three holes, with all bets doubling on the ninth.

The Ormsby-Gores (later Lord and Lady Harlech) were often guests of the Kennedys at Cape Cod, Camp David and Palm Beach, but their discussions rarely centered on British-U.S. affairs. They had been personal friends for many years, and the President felt no obligation either to transform all his personal relationships to an official level or to transfer all his professional relationships to the social level. I saw them socially on comparatively rare occasions, without the slightest embarrassment about this on either side.

When he was not working, he and Jacqueline liked having people around who were cheerful, amusing, energetic, informed and informal. While the friends mentioned in
Chapter I
also served as sources and sounding boards for independent ideas and information, they sought, with rare exception, no influence or favors, and they were all as candid and casual with the Commander in Chief as they had been when he was a Congressman. He found, after the first few weeks, that it was difficult for him as President to take walks with an old friend around the Washington Monument or to drop in on one as casually as he had dropped in at Joe Alsop’s his first night as President (where he hungrily devoured terrapin soup, the only food that could be located, while discussing the experiences of Inaugural Day). But he did continue his practice of calling his old friends by telephone at all hours of the day and night.

HIS FAMILY

No friend ever drew as close to John Kennedy, or contributed so much to his spirit and strength, as his wife, his daughter and his son. He would rather eat fettucine with them in the family dining room than preside over the most important formal banquet in the State Dining Room. Whatever cares or crises pressed upon him, he kept time free for his family and kept his family life free from the strains of office. He deeply loved his wife and children; he was deeply proud of them; and their love and pride in turn provided him with both essential relief from his burdens and additional reason to bear them.

His children often played on the equipment newly set up on the lawn behind the Mansion, and that was also the play area for a small White House school which the First Lady organized to make life more normal for Caroline and John. Whenever he saw either of them playing out on the lawn or walking with one of their several dogs, the President would interrupt all but the most formal conversations in his office, stand in the outside door and clap his hands until both children and dogs came rushing over. Awkwardly stooping down, he ignored pain and passers-by to pick them up, his face more relaxed in those moments than I had ever seen it with any adult.

Back in the days when he was traveling the long, hard road that had led him to the White House, John Kennedy had had too little time to spend with Caroline (whose first word was “plane”); and John, Jr. was not born until his father was President-elect. Consequently it was in the White House, and on their holidays together, that the President truly discovered his children. How best to rear children, a subject of no interest to him in earlier days when his friends and siblings raised it about their offspring, suddenly became one of his favorite topics of discussion.

Like their parents, both Caroline and John, Jr. were unusually bright, alert and constantly inquisitive, bursting with restless energy, reserved with newcomers but always friendly. While legend has already made them sound more like angels than normal children, they were as capable of mischief and misbehavior in the White House as any other children in any other house; and their mother, referring during the campaign to the books of Kennedy supporter Dr. Benjamin Spock, said she found it “a relief to know that other people’s children are as bad…at the same age.”

President Kennedy, that intellectual, sophisticated man, considered cold by his critics and complicated by his admirers, possessed a gift for communicating with children—with his children, with my children, with all children. He never talked down to them, and they always understood him. “He talked to me,” confided one aide’s thirteen-year-old son to his diary, “with an air of business-like equality.” At the same time he was realistically aware of how limited an adult’s influence is in the small child’s world. Secretary McNamara liked to tell of the time he saw the President accost Caroline in the midst of the Cuban crisis just before her supper hour. “Caroline,” he said, “have you been eating candy?” She ignored him. The question was repeated and it was again ignored. Finally, summoning up his full dignity as Commander in Chief, he asked his daughter, “Caroline, answer me. Have you been eating candy—yes, no or maybe?”

Similarly, when he was accompanied by John, Jr. one morning to our pre-press conference breakfast, he found his son’s continued presence unbusinesslike but not easily ended. After shaking hands and bowing all around with a gusto worthy of Honey Fitz himself, John took over a proffered chair and very nearly took over the meeting. His father’s suggestions to leave, accompanied by bribes to take him to the office later, were loudly resisted. Deciding to ignore him, the President opened his request for questions with the usual “What have we got today?” The first answer was John’s:
“I’ve
got a glass of water.” Accepting defeat, the President sent for the children’s long-time nurse, an unflappable English “nanny” who soon persuaded John that he should join his sister. “Marvelous,” said the President, “there would have been a storm of tears if I had tried that.”

Caroline Kennedy quickly became a national figure—tottering somewhat unsteadily into her father’s Palm Beach press briefing in her mother’s shoes, offering a rose to India’s Nehru, wandering into the press lobby to report that her father was “sitting upstairs with his shoes and socks off not doing anything,” emerging from church with her large rag doll in her father’s custody, wading into a friend’s swimming pool over her head, and asking Speaker Rayburn why he didn’t have any hair. She took to horses like her mother, to the sea like her father and to books like both. Together with John, Jr., she met more heads of state than most Cabinet members, often watched ceremonies on the White House lawn from upstairs (once with cries of “bang” to echo each volley in a twenty-one-gun salute) and one hot day took a dip in the South Lawn fountain.

Her father, who gave up calling her “Buttons” when she acted so grown-up at age four, was fascinated by her retentive memory, a trait both he and his wife had long possessed, and as she grew older, the bedtime stories at which he excelled were supplemented by the poetry which he delighted in hearing her repeat. Addressing on the South Lawn a group dedicated to preserving the White House and other historical buildings, he had occasion to quote spontaneously one of the couplets he had taught his daughter and which he had long promised her he would use in a speech:

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:

Came and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

He correctly attributed these lines to Edna St. Vincent Millay. But later he told me with some embarrassment that he had almost said Emily Dickinson and that Caroline’s memory was better than his.

Both parents, the wife more than the husband, worried about the effects of too much publicity on both children, the daughter more than the son. In the hectic preinaugural days, watching over his daughter between appointments and task forces while Jacqueline was in the hospital with infant John, the President-elect suggested to the reporters and photographers who followed Caroline’s every move that it was “time we retired her.” But this was not easily done in the White House, with the press and public wanting more and more pictures and feature items. Jacqueline came to the conclusion that neither her husband nor his Press Secretary was as concerned as she that publicity would alter the children’s attitudes. When I remarked that one authorized article on Caroline of which she was complaining had been regarded as excellent by the President and Salinger, she replied a bit tartly, “Well,
they
are not very good judges, if you ask me.”