These Few Precious Days (17 page)

If Mrs. Kennedy had her way, the White House would be surrounded by high brick walls. And a moat with crocodiles.

—J. B. WEST, CHIEF WHITE HOUSE USHER

6

“Keep Her Riding”

“A
dmit it,” the president of the United States said as he leaned back and lit his second cigar of the day. The senator from Florida, sitting just to the right of the president’s desk in one of the nineteenth-century cane-backed chairs Jackie had handpicked for the Oval Office, was already beginning to squirm. He took a long drag on his cigarette before answering.

“Admit what?” George Smathers asked.

“You told me not to marry Jackie,” JFK said with a wry smile. “You said that she was too young and not sophisticated enough. I want you to admit right here in the Oval Office and right now that you were wrong. Dead wrong.”

Until now, it was always Jackie who delighted in needling Smathers. “I remember what you told Jack,” she would whisper into his ear as they danced together in the East Room during a state dinner. “You told him I wasn’t
good enough
for him.” For the rest of her life, in fact, she would bring this up to Smathers every time they met, without exception.

“Oh Jackie, for God’s sake,” Smathers would reply, “I was just
testing
him. I wanted to see if he really loved you!” Smathers knew Jackie “didn’t buy it, but she was nice enough to make a running joke out of it. I’m not so sure she thought it was so funny at the time.”

Smathers’ definition of “sophistication” may have differed somewhat from the norm. What he meant at the time was that Jackie might not be able to tolerate her husband’s womanizing. It was Smathers, after all, who accompanied Jack on many skirt-chasing expeditions. Years earlier the two men had even tried to convince their fellow congressman Richard Nixon to cheat on his wife, Pat, during a fact-finding mission to Europe; they provided him with the names and numbers of women to contact in Paris—a note Nixon promptly crumpled up and threw away.

Right now, however, the president wanted an answer. “Look, George,” he said, waving his hands over his desk. “Look at this magnificent desk we’re sitting at. The detail, the craftsmanship, the history. It’s only here because of Jackie, and that goes for the rest of this place.”

The mammoth
Resolute
desk, carved from the timbers of the British warship HMS
Resolute
and given to President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria in 1878, was indeed as good a symbol as any of all that Jackie had been able to accomplish during their first year in office. This was the same desk FDR sat behind as he delivered his famous “Fireside Chats” on the radio, and Jackie discovered it languishing under a canvas sheet in the basement.

Jack was so enamored of the desk that he asked her to have a copy made to use after he left office. Jackie also worked with Dr. Travell and the New York’s Gunlocke Company to design a special, high-backed, leather-upholstered swivel chair to alleviate Jack’s back problems while he worked in the Oval Office. JFK intended to take that chair with him when he left office as well.

The desk would become famous for reasons that had nothing to do with history or weighty matters of state. Visiting world leaders, cabinet members, or presidential advisers could be thrashing out some important issue when a curious sound might emanate from inside the desk.

“Is there a rabbit in there?” the president would ask just as the hinged door beneath the desk popped open and John made his entrance. The toddler then ran around the room, whooping and making faces while Jack clapped his approval.

The
Resolute
desk was not, as it happened, Jackie’s biggest find. That distinction went to James Monroe’s historic 1817 Bellangé pier table, which for decades had been disguised under a thick layer of gold radiator paint. There were other treasures that had been abandoned in storerooms and closets: the Lincolns’ china service, busts of Columbus and Martin Van Buren, a superb portrait of Andrew Jackson, the Monroe gold and silver flatware service.

Yet treasure-hunting of this sort—“spelunking,” she called it—was only a small part of the task. With the help of Sister Parish and the Kennedys’ old friend Bill Walton, a
Time
correspondent who gave up journalism for a career as an artist, Jackie set up the White House Fine Arts Committee with Winterthur Museum founder Henry Francis DuPont as its chairman. The name DuPont set the bar in terms of wealth and taste for the rest of the committee’s membership, which included Mrs. Paul Mellon, Mrs. Henry Ford II, Mrs. Charles Engelhard, Mrs. Albert Lasker, and Mrs. C. Douglas Dillon.

Committee members, as it turned out, contributed far more than just their time, expertise, and the cachet of their names. Mary Lasker donated a nineteenth-century Savonnerie rug for the Blue Room, Bunny Mellon provided Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of Thomas Jefferson, and the C. Douglas Dillons shipped an entire roomful of Empire furniture to the White House along with one piece Jackie personally helped move into a place of honor in the Red Room—Dolley Madison’s sofa.

Instead of choosing an American to head up the restoration, she gave the job to France’s most revered decorator, Stéphane Boudin. The flamboyant seventy-two-year-old president of the Paris decorating house of Jansen had a knack for re-creating the ceremonial grandeur of the Louis XVI and Empire periods—precisely the look Jackie was going for.

Rather than risk a backlash for not choosing a homegrown designer, Jackie simply concealed Boudin’s involvement from the public. In the process, she also had to referee the inevitable battles between the high-strung Boudin and DuPont, an unyielding stickler for historical verisimilitude. Jackie allowed Boudin to prevail everywhere except the Green Room, which DuPont filled with spindly eighteenth-century American tables and chairs. Jackie braced herself and escorted Boudin to the Green Room for his first glimpse of DuPont’s vision. Boudin gasped. “But,” he said, “it’s full of
legs
.”

Notwithstanding the magnanimous gifts and hundreds of thousands of dollars donated by the first couple’s wealthy friends, Jackie still had to figure out a way to finance the massive restoration effort. Jackie came up with the idea of publishing the first White House guidebook—
The White House: An Historic Guide
—which not only financed the restoration but went on to sell more than 4.5 million copies, earning tens of millions of dollars for future White House projects.

Jackie then had to convince a skeptical public that it had all been worth it. Jack, like the rest of the nation, sat glued to the set when Jackie gave the first televised tour of the White House on Valentine’s Day, 1962. Unlike Jack, a seasoned pro when it came to TV, Jackie was petrified at the thought of appearing for a full hour on prime time. “My husband,” she whispered to veteran CBS correspondent Charles Collingwood before going on the air, “is making me do this, you know.”

The president did fulfill his promise to Jackie to make a brief appearance at the end of the show, but he really needn’t have. Drawing an astounding 46 million viewers (the taped program was broadcast on CBS and NBC on February 14, and on ABC the following day), Jackie’s White House tour ranked at the time as the most-watched prime-time broadcast in the history of the medium.

JFK “took such pride in what she accomplished,” Ted Sorensen said, “because it really was a minor miracle. When you tinker with something as cherished as the White House it really takes guts and vision and skill. All these things Jackie had in abundance.” Given Jackie’s highbrow tastes and the fact that she was a known Francophile, Jack feared a backlash. He was “surprised at what a superb diplomat she was,” Tish Baldrige said. “It astounded him that she was able to do it, but even more so that she was able to sell the idea of changing the White House so brilliantly.” Now whenever Jack spoke of his wife, Arthur Schlesinger said, “his eyes brightened.”

George Smathers saw that look right now. “Of course I’ll admit it, Mr. President,” he said. “I wish I’d never said it, and I sure wish you’d never
told
her I said it!”

In a matter of months the new first lady had also made giant strides toward her goal of creating what she called “an American Versailles,” in the process setting a new standard for entertaining at the White House. Ultimately, she and Jack would play host to seventy-four world leaders and preside over fifteen state dinners—each more dazzling than the last.

For the first of these—a dinner for Tunisia’s diminutive President Habib Burguiba—Jackie dazzled in an off-the-shoulder Cassini gown of pale yellow silk organza. Overturning 150 years of tradition, she unilaterally replaced the long banquet tables that had always been used in the East Room with round tables, decreeing that the president and first lady sit at separate tables, and that each of the other tables be hosted by a dignitary. Jackie also hired a French chef, René Verdon, and employed the talents of noted horticulturist Bunny Mellon to advise her on floral arrangements. (Mellon also redesigned the Rose Garden and the East Garden as part of Jackie’s restoration project.)

The most audacious effort—and the first state dinner ever to be held outside the White House—was for Pakistan’s president Muhammad Ayub Khan. When JFK said he wanted to repay Khan for sending five thousand troops to fight a communist insurgency in Laos, Jackie suggested holding a candlelit dinner on the lawn of Mount Vernon, with its sweeping views of the Potomac.

“It was a logistical horror show,” recalled Baldrige. Among other things, there was no electricity at Mount Vernon at the time, so giant generators had to be brought in. A tent pavilion had to be set up, as well as a stage for the National Symphony Orchestra. Everything—White House tables, china, silver, glassware—had to be trucked in by the Army, while the Navy was enlisted to transport the 150 guests fifteen miles downriver to George Washington’s stately home by boat. Each of the four vessels had its own trio of musicians, who serenaded guests during the hour-long cruise.

Although the guest list for the historic dinner was dominated by the names of cabinet members and other high-ranking government officials, there were also contributors to Jackie’s restoration efforts, including the DuPonts, the Mellons, and a little-known diamond merchant named Maurice Tempelsman. Some thirty years later, Tempelsman would become, with the exception of John Jr., the most important man in Jackie’s life—her lover and devoted companion in her final years.

“I thought she was crazy for even suggesting it,” Baldrige said of the ambitious state dinner on the grounds of Mount Vernon. “But everything went off without a hitch. It was a magical night. Unforgettable.” Baldrige gave full credit to the first lady. “Sometimes I thought they should have made Jackie the head of the joint chiefs. She knew how to marshal forces and make things happen.”

With the exception of the president and his brother Bobby, who wore black tie, all the men wore white dinner jackets. Jackie wore a sleeveless white organza dress with an emerald green sash and stole designed by Cassini. Everyone watched the Continental Fife and Drum Corps in their eighteenth-century uniforms perform drills and then, at the end of the show, take aim with their muskets and fire blanks directly at the press corps. A cameraman waved a white flag, and Jack wept with laughter.

THERE WOULD BE OTHER MAGICAL
nights that year. In November 1961, the legendary Spanish cellist Pablo Casals performed at a state dinner for Puerto Rico’s governor, Luis Muñoz Marín. It was the first time Casals had been to the White House since 1904, when he performed for Teddy Roosevelt. Among the guests was Teddy’s acid-tongued daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who had been present for Casals’s 1904 White House performance.

Among the 153 guests that night was Leonard Bernstein. “Fires are roaring in all the fireplaces,” he said. “The food is marvelous, the wines are delicious, people are laughing,
laughing out loud
, telling stories, jokes, enjoying themselves, glad to be there . . .” It was, he continued, “like a different world, utterly like a different planet.”