These Few Precious Days (22 page)

Some holidays were more problematic than others. The idea of taking them trick-or-treating posed what, on the surface, appeared to be a security nightmare. Nevertheless, one Halloween night Arthur Schlesinger was standing on the doorstep of his Georgetown home handing out candy to trick-or-treaters when a mask-wearing mother spoke up.

“Come on, now, children,” she said, “it’s time to go to the next house.”

“The voice,” Schlesinger recalled, “was unmistakably Jackie’s.”

John was unquestionably adorable and would go on to overshadow his sister as an adult. At Camelot’s zenith, however, Caroline was the bigger attraction. No less than the glittering state dinners and headline-grabbing trips abroad, the little girl’s Norman Rockwell life of ponies, toys, and tea parties contributed greatly to the Kennedy mystique. As the
New York Times
put it, no one had seen the public make such a fuss over a child “since Shirley Temple shot to international fame.”

As much as she abhorred incessant incursions on her family’s cherished privacy, Jackie became truly incensed whenever someone tried to make money off the Kennedy name. “They are now selling Caroline Christmas dolls—
with wardrobe
,” Jackie complained to Pierre in yet another angry memo. “Can’t you do something about this?”

Joe Kennedy had no trouble understanding America’s love affair with the president’s children. He doted on Caroline, in particular—just as he doted on Jackie. J. B. West recalled that whenever the ambassador came to visit, Jackie “danced down the halls arm in arm with him, laughing uproariously at his teasing.” The first lady and Joe “were buddies,” said Hamilton P. “Ham” Brown, the Secret Service agent assigned to protect the president’s father. “She loved him, and he admired her, respected her. He was grateful that Jackie had stuck by the President through everything, sure. But it was more than that. There was a very tight bond of affection between them that was unlike anything else in that whole family. They always lit up when they saw each other.”

In mid-December 1961, the president and his wife headed off for another whirlwind goodwill tour, this time of Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Colombia. Once again—and very much to Jack’s delight—the first lady was a huge hit, embracing children in orphanages, visiting elderly patients in hospitals, and conversing in fluent Spanish with dignitaries and common folk alike. Crowds chanted “JFK” and “Viva, Miss America!” wherever the couple went.

On December 18 they stopped over in Palm Beach on the way home to see Joe, and so Jackie could also start moving things into the house that would serve as their new base during the Christmas holidays. So as not to crowd the rest of the Kennedy family, this time Jack and Jackie rented a luxurious eight-bedroom estate just a mile away from Papa Joe’s La Guerida. The new winter White House, boasting a heated pool and four hundred feet of ocean frontage, belonged to the elder Kennedys’ wealthy friends C. Michael Paul and his wife, Josephine Bay Paul, head of the Wall Street brokerage firm Kidder & Company.

The next day, Grandpa Joe took Caroline to the airport to wave goodbye to Air Force One as her daddy departed for Washington. Once he handed Caroline off to Maud Shaw, Joe headed for the links to play a round with his favorite niece, Ann Gargan. The president’s seventy-three-year-old father was about to tee off on the eighth hole when he suddenly became faint. Gargan took her uncle home, and he went upstairs for a nap. Four hours later, after Gargan checked in on him and discovered he could neither speak nor move, an ambulance was finally summoned.

The seventy-three-year-old family patriarch had suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed on his right side and only able to utter the word “no,” which he did repeatedly. “It was frustrating for him, obviously,” Agent Brown said. “But it was also hard on the President and the First Lady. He always came to his dad for advice, and she just loved him.”

From this point on, the man who put JFK in the White House was confined to a wheelchair, capable of understanding everything being said around him but incapable of communicating his thoughts. Although his face was often contorted and he sometimes drooled, Jackie made sure he was still included in White House functions. She always sat next to Joe at lunches and dinners, talking to him, helping him with his food, and kidding with him as she had always done.

Jack also was careful to include his father in conversations and deliberations, turning to him for reassurance even when he had no hope of deciphering what Joe was trying to say. Lifting off the Hyannis Port lawn aboard the presidential helicopter, JFK looked down at his father slumped in his wheelchair. “It’s all because of him, everything,” he told Chuck Spalding. “None of this would have happened if it weren’t for him. We owe it all to him.”

After her White House tour television special drew 77 percent of the viewing public in February 1962, Jackie could easily claim to be the most admired woman in America—perhaps the world. During an earlier screening in the White House movie theater, she nursed a drink while the president puffed on one of his favorite Upmann Havanas. As the lights went up, CBS producer Perry Wolff recalled, Jack “looked at her with adoration and admiration. There was an emotional connection in that couple, I have no doubt. It was a real look of love.”

No one appreciated that look from her husband—or the change in the public’s perception of her—more than Jackie. “Everyone thought I was a snob,” Jackie later recalled. “Jack never made me feel like a liability to him during the election, but I
was
. Now everything that I’d always done suddenly became wonderful, and I was so happy for Jack, because even though it was for only three years together in the White House, he could be proud of me then. You know, because it made him happy, it made
me
so happy.”

Not long after, the first couple threw one of their famous dinner parties for twelve—this time in honor of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. As he approached the head of the receiving line, Leonard Bernstein was greeted by Stravinsky with a bear hug and kisses on both cheeks. “There was all this Russian kissing and embracing going on,” Bernstein recalled, when from the far corner of the room came a familiar voice. “Hey,” JFK said, “how about me?” Bernstein called the moment “so endearing and so insanely unpresidential, and at the same time never losing dignity.”

Unfortunately, the moments at these White House soirees were not always so dignified. Jackie might have a drink and a glass of wine or champagne, and the president seldom had more than one drink—often a daiquiri, a glass of wine, or a Dubonnet, sometimes a martini or a Scotch—but their overexcited guests frequently got caught up in the moment. That evening, the great Stravinsky got so drunk he had to be literally carried out of the party.

This paled in comparison to a raucous dinner for eighty held the previous Veterans Day for Fiat tycoon Gianni Agnelli. At that affair, a well-lubricated Lyndon Johnson crashed to the dance floor while attempting the Twist, and Gore Vidal got into a tiff with Bobby Kennedy after daring to place his hand on Jackie’s shoulder—a quarrel that turned so nasty Jackie banned Vidal from the White House forever.

WITH THE FIRST LADY’S STOCK
seemingly at an all-time high, Jack, said Tish Baldrige, “felt it was time for Jackie to take her act back on the road.” In the fall of 1961 JFK accepted invitations extended by India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and President Muhammad Ayub Khan of Pakistan to visit their countries. While Kennedy was fond of the Pakistani leader, he could not bear Nehru’s sermonizing. “That sanctimonious fucker,” Jack said. “He’s the worst phony you’ve ever seen.” But the cracks in the relationship between India and the United States were beginning to show, and something had to be done.

Over the next four months, Jackie caused something of a diplomatic kerfuffle by postponing the trip three times; the excuse was always sinus trouble, even though during this same period she taped her TV special, hosted a number of White House parties, rode to the hounds with the Orange County Hunt, and water-skied off the back of the
Marlin
in Palm Beach.

Jackie was actually working up the courage to head out on her own. “Jack is always so proud of me when I do something like this,” she said, “but I can’t stand being out in front.” In March 1962, she set out on her first solo trip abroad—cautiously billed, at the first lady’s request, as a “14-day semiofficial cultural goodwill tour” of the Indian subcontinent. “Solo” was something of a misnomer as well. For company on the road, Jackie had her sister, Lee; her maid, Provi; her favorite Secret Service man, Clint Hill; her hairdresser, sixty-four pieces of luggage—and sixty journalists.

But first, Jackie stopped over in Rome for a private audience with Pope John XXIII. Cassini had created a full-length black dress for the occasion, worn with a lace mantilla borrowed from her sister-in-law Ethel Kennedy. Jackie and the pope chatted in French for more than thirty minutes—the longest private audience with a foreign dignitary John XXIII had ever granted during his papacy. (Jack would never get the chance to meet the charismatic John XXIII, who died on June 3, 1963.)

In his capacity as U.S. ambassador, noted Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith—at six feet, eight inches a towering figure in every sense of the word—greeted Jackie when her plane landed in New Delhi on March 12, 1962. In the coming days, Jackie saw the Taj Mahal by moonlight, fed pandas, jumped horses, took a boat ride down the Ganges, teamed up with her sister to ride a thirty-five-year-old elephant named Bibi, recoiled at the sight of a mongoose fighting a cobra, left a bouquet of white roses at Mahatma Gandhi’s shrine, partied with the Maharaja and Maharani of Jaipur at their famous nine-hundred-room “Pink Palace,” and chatted for hours with India’s first prime minister as they strolled the private gardens of his official residence. Nehru became so enamored of his American guests, in fact, that he asked Jackie and Lee to stay with him.

The Bouvier sisters were not disappointed; over the course of their stay in the prime minister’s residence they were guests of honor at several elaborate banquets where they were entertained by dancers in brilliantly colored saris twirling to the music of a sitar orchestra. “Nehru was a lonesome man,” said Galbraith, “who loved the company of beautiful and intelligent women.”

Just as they had in Europe and South America, thousands of people turned out to cheer the woman whom one overwrought Indian journalist described as the new “Durga, Goddess of Power.” “Jackie Ki Jai! Ameriki Rani!” (“Hail Jackie! Queen of America!”) the crowds shouted as she rode in the back of an open car, responding with a gesture of
namastes
, the palms-together Indian greeting.

The reception in Pakistan was no different: tens of thousands lined the streets to catch of a glimpse of Jackie riding in an open car from Lahore Airport with President Ayub Khan. As a token of his gratitude for the state dinner previously given in his honor at Mount Vernon, Ayub Khan presented Jackie with a spectacular emerald, ruby, and diamond necklace and the gift she would come to regard as the best she had ever been given by a foreign leader: a magnificent ten-year-old Thoroughbred bay gelding named Sardar.

Karachi, Rawalpindi, and the Khyber Pass were all on Jackie’s itinerary in Pakistan, but none matched the beauty and wonder of the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore. “I only wish,” she told her hosts, “my husband could be with me.”

Not surprisingly, by the time she left Pakistan for a three-day stopover in London, Jackie—who was “adamant” about taking a nap every day rather than be “run into the ground”—was nonetheless on the verge of collapse. She seemed none the worse for wear, however, when the Radziwills threw a party for her that included Cassini, British actress Moira Shearer, and legendary photographer and costume designer Cecil Beaton on the guest list. This time Oleg, who at several White House parties had taken it upon himself to demonstrate the Twist to guests more familiar with the foxtrot, taught Jackie an even more au courant dance: the Hully Gully.

On her return to the States, there was the inevitable criticism from Republicans in Congress that military aircraft had been used to transport Sardar to the United States from Pakistan. But not even that could dim what was another diplomatic triumph for America’s thirty-two-year-old first lady. The trip not only smoothed over relations with India, in particular, but on the home front Americans were captivated by photographs of Jackie and Lee riding elephants and camels and touring the grounds of the Taj Mahal.

“The President expected Jackie to seduce Nehru the way she seduced de Gaulle and at the very least charmed Khrushchev,” Galbraith said. “She did not disappoint.” In the end, the ambassador said, Jackie did nothing less than remove all the “bitterness” that had existed between India and the United States. “Jackie had to walk a tightrope, never appearing to take herself too seriously, and at the same time maintaining a certain aura of . . .
majesty
is the only word I can think of to describe it.”

In terms of Jackie’s role in enhancing American prestige abroad, journalist Theodore White noted, JFK “knew just how valuable she was.” The political payoff back home was just as significant. “The President used to call me into the Oval Office to look at the headlines and the pictures, grinning from ear to ear and saying ‘That’s our girl!’ ” Salinger remembered. “Jackie made you proud to be an American, and that feeling translates into votes.”