These Few Precious Days (46 page)

The thousands upon thousands of articles and news reports about the Kennedys that have been published over the past half century also served as source material for this and my earlier books, including press accounts in the
New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, Life, Vanity Fair, Look, Saturday Evening Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune,
and
New Yorker
as well as reports carried on the Associated Press, United Press International, and Reuters wires.

Chapters 1 and 2

Interview subjects included Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Pierre Salinger, Theodore Sorensen, Letitia Baldrige, Chuck Spalding, George Plimpton, Godfrey McHugh, Jacques Lowe, Hugh D. “Yusha” Auchincloss III, Charles Bartlett, Jack Valenti, Jamie Auchincloss, Ham Brown, Richard B. Stolley, Willard K. Rice, Jack Anderson, and Dr. Janet Travell. The author also drew on numerous oral histories, including those given by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Robert F. Kennedy, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Dean Rusk, Admiral George G. Burkley, Dave Powers, Robert McNamara, Pamela Turnure, Kenneth O’Donnell, Maud Shaw, Nancy Tuckerman, Janet Auchincloss, J. B. West, Lawrence O’Brien, Douglas Dillon, Walt Rostow, Peter Lawford, Paul “Red” Fay, Ted Sorensen, Hugh Sidey, Richard Cardinal Cushing, Peter Lisagor, William Walton, John Galvin, Liz Carpenter, Torbert Macdonald, Tazewell Shepard, Jacqueline Hirsh, Sarah McClendon, Isaac Avery, Cordelia Thaxton, Dorothy Tubridy, Father John C. Cavanaugh, and Arthur Krock.

National Security Agency, Secret Service, and Federal Bureau of Investigation files released through the Freedom of Information Act shed considerable light on the events of November 22, 1963, as did the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis papers, the John Fitzgerald Kennedy papers (
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, John F. Kennedy, Containing the Public Messages, Statements, and Speeches of the President (1961–1963
), the Robert F. Kennedy papers, and the papers of Dave Powers, Kenneth O’Donnell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Theodore H. White, Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, Godfrey McHugh, Paul “Red” Fay, Dean Rusk, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Lawrence O’Brien, Dr. Janet Travell, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Joseph P. Kennedy. Teddy White’s historic “Camelot” interview conducted shortly after the assassination was released in full only in 1995, one year after Jackie’s death. Other published sources consulted: William Manchester,
The Death of a President
(New York: Harper & Row, 1967);
The Warren Commission Report
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964); Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
A Thousand Days
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965); Jim Bishop,
The Day Kennedy Was Shot
(New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968); Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers with Joe McCarthy, “
Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye
” (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970); Theodore Sorensen,
Kennedy
(New York: Harper & Row, 1965); “The Assassination of President Kennedy,”
Life,
November 29, 1963; J. B. West,
Upstairs at the White House
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973); Ben Bradlee,
A Good Life
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); Mary Barelli Gallagher,
My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy
(New York: David McKay, 1969); Maud Shaw,
White House Nanny: My Years with Caroline and John Kennedy, Jr.
(New York: New American Library, 1965); Lady Bird Johnson,
A White House Diary
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970); Clint Hill with Lisa McCubbin,
Mrs. Kennedy and Me
(New York: Gallery Books, 2012); Robert Sam Anson,
They’ve Killed the President! The Search for the Murderers of John F. Kennedy
(New York: Bantam, 1975); Ben Bradlee,
Conversations with Kennedy
(New York: Norton, 1975).

Chapters 3–5

These chapters were based in part on conversations with Theodore Sorensen, Jacques Lowe, Pierre Salinger, Gore Vidal, Letitia Baldrige, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Chuck Spalding, Charles Bartlett, John Husted, Larry Newman, Nancy Dickerson Whitehead, Martha Bartlett, Hugh D. “Yusha” Auchincloss; William S. Paley, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Robert Drew, Jamie Auchincloss, Clare Boothe Luce, Shirley MacLaine, Bette Davis, and Evelyn Lincoln.

The Laura Bergquist Knebel Papers at Boston University, oral histories: Claiborne Pell, Leverett Saltonstall, Sargent Shriver, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, John W. McCormack, John F. Dempsey, Hale Boggs, Dean Acheson, John Sherman Cooper, James MacGregor Burns, Leonard Bernstein, Mark Shaw, Peter Lawford, Sister Parish, Patrick Mulkern, Dory Shary, Torbert Macdonald, J. B. West, Fletcher Knebel, Ralph Horton, Patrick Munroe, Joseph Alsop, Harold S. Ulen, James Farrell, William O. Douglas, Edward M. Gallagher, Francis X. Morrissey, Foster Furcolo, John Kelso, Helen Lempart, Jean McGonigle Mannix, Joanne Barbosa, Peter Cloherty, Mark Dalton, Joseph Casey, William F. Kelly, Harold Tinker, John J. Droney, Hugh Fraser, Howard Fitzpatrick, Joseph Russo, Garrett Byrne, Anthony Gallucio, Andrew Dazzi, James M. Murphy, Joseph Degugliemo, Mary Colbert, William DeMarco, Maurice Donahue, Roland Evans Jr. Some material regarding Max Jacobson’s relationship with the Kennedys comes from Jacobson’s unpublished memoir. Father John C. Cavanaugh’s oral history can be found in the Andrew Mellon Library Oral History Collection of the Choate School and in the JFK Library’s oral history collection.

Articles and other published sources for this period included Eleanor Harris, “The Senator Is in a Hurry,”
McCall’s,
August 1957; Herbert Parmet,
Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy
(New York: Dial Press, 1980); “The Senate’s Gay Young Bachelor,”
Saturday Evening Post,
June 13, 1953; “How to Be a Presidential Candidate,”
New York Times Magazine,
July 13, 1958; “Behind the Scenes,”
Time,
May 5, 1958; Luella R. Hennessey, “Bringing Up the Kennedys,”
Good Housekeeping,
August 1961; “Joe Kennedy’s Feelings About His Son,”
Life
, December 19, 1960; Susan Sheehan, “The Happy Jackie, the Sad Jackie, the Bad Jackie, the Good Jackie,”
New York Times Magazine
, May 31, 1970; “This Is John Fitzgerald Kennedy,”
Newsweek
, June 23, 1958; “Most Talked-About Candidate for 1960,”
U.S. News & World Report
, November 8, 1957; Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer,
Jacqueline
Bouvier Kennedy
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961); John H. David,
The Bouviers: Portrait of an American Family
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969); Thomas C. Reeves,
A Question of Character
(New York: Free Press, 1991); “Jackie Kennedy: First Lady at 30?”
U.S. News & World Report
, September 1960; Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer, “First Years of the First Lady,”
Ladies’ Home Journal
, February 1961; Dave Powers, “I Have Never Met Anyone Like Her,”
Life
, August 1995.

Chapters 6–8

For these chapters, the author drew on conversations with John Kenneth Galbraith, Oleg Cassini, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., George Smathers, Roswell Gilpatric, Pierre Salinger, Theodore Sorensen, Jacques Lowe, Angier Biddle Duke, Linus Pauling, Charles Bartlett, Letitia Baldrige, Tony Bradlee, Helen Thomas, Betty Beale, Chuck Spalding, Larry Newman, Pat Lawford, Alan Jay Lerner, Ham Brown, Halston, Nancy Tuckerman, Hugh D. “Yusha” Auchincloss III, Charles Collingwood, Dorothy Schoenbrun, Dorothy Oliger, Mollie Fosburgh, Harry Winston, Charles Furneaux, Shana Alexander, Fred Friendly, and Alfred Eisenstaedt. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s oral history was done by Terry L. Birdwhistell in New York on May 13, 1981, as part of the John Sherman Cooper Oral History Project at the University of Kentucky Library. Other oral histories that proved helpful include Pope Paul VI, Hubert H. Humphrey, Averell Harriman, Katharine Graham, Claiborne Pell, Nicholas Katzenbach, Lorraine Cooper, Albert Gore, Admiral George Burkley, Lucius Clay, William Walton, Walt Rostow, Jacob Javits, Dave Powers, Pamela Turnure, Laura Knebel, Clement Norton, Gloria Sitrin, Kay Halle, Traphes Bryant, Myer Feldman, Joseph Karatis, Chris Camp, James Young, Barbara Gamarekian, and Kenneth Burke. The Katharine Graham and Liz Carpenter Oral Histories are available at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. Published sources include Hugh Sidey, “The First Lady Brings History and Beauty to the White House,”
Life
, September l, 1961;
Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy
(New York: Hyperion, 2011); Anne Taylor Fleming, “The Kennedy Mystique,”
New York Times Magazine
, June 17, 1979; Phillip Nobile and Ron Rosenblum, “The Curious Aftermath of JFK’s Best and Brightest Affair,”
New Times
magazine, July 9, 1976; “Queen of America,”
Time
, March 23, 1962; Gerri Hirshey, “The Last Act of Judith Exner,”
Vanity Fair
, April 1990; Mimi Alford,
Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath
(New York: Random House, 2012); Kitty Kelley,
Capturing Camelot
(New York: A Thomas Dunne Book/St. Martin’s Press, 2012); Thomas Maier,
The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings
(New York: Basic Books, 2004).

Chapters 9 and 10

Information for these chapters was based in part on conversations with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., George Plimpton, Letitia Baldrige, Pierre Salinger, Oleg Cassini, Charles Bartlett, Chuck Spalding, John Kenneth Galbraith, Martha Bartlett, Richard B. Stolley, Dr. Janet Travell, Peter Duchin, Paul “Red” Fay, Hugh D. “Yusha” Auchincloss III, Evelyn Lincoln, David Halberstam, George Smathers, Theodore Sorensen, Jack Valenti, Jacques Lowe, Godfrey McHugh, William S. Paley, Sandy Richardson, Jamie Auchincloss, John Bryson, Paula Dranov, Cranston Jones, Clare Boothe Luce, and Roswell Gilpatric. The author also drew on numerous oral histories, including Dave Powers, Kenneth P. O’Donnell, Lawrence O’Brien, Luella Hennessey, Hervé Alphand, James Reed, Burke Marshall, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Pierre Salinger, Walt Rostow, Janet Auchincloss, Joseph Alsop, August Heckscher, Lorraine Cooper, Lem Billings, John Sherman Cooper, and Richard Cardinal Cushing. Among the published sources: Jacqueline Kennedy, “How He Really Was,”
Life
, May 29, 1964; Robert Ajemian, “A Man’s Week to Reckon,”
Life
, July 3, 1964; Theodore Sorensen, “If Kennedy Had Lived,”
Look,
October 19, 1965; Jack Anderson,
Washington Expose
(Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1967); Lawrence K. Altman and Todd S. Purdum, “In J.F.K. File, Hidden Illness, Pain and Pills,”
New York Times
, November 17, 2002; Ted Widmer,
Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy
(New York: Hyperion, 2012); Sally Bedell Smith,
Grace and Power
(New York: Random House, 2004); “The Kennedys’ Jesuit,”
Georgetown Voice
, January 15, 2004; Helen Kennedy, “Jackie Kennedy Tapes Unveil True Feelings,” New York
Daily News
, September 13, 2011; Christopher Hitchens, “Widow of Opportunity,”
Vanity Fair
, December 2011; Janny Scott, “In Tapes, Candid Talk by a Young Widow,”
New York Times
, September 11, 2011; Andy Soltis, “Well, That’s a Tough Day,”
New York Post
, January 25, 2012.

Bibliography