she flung into renewing the Executive Mansion. The sensational success of that venture stunned JFK and his New Frontiersmen in the West Wing. The President was equally surprised by other demonstrations of his wife’s political astuteness. When Prime Minister Nehru came to visit, JFK had a horrible time with this aloof, pompous, humorless man. Jackie charmed him. Similarly, the President was never able to get on a relaxed footing with his UN. Ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, the two-time loser in presidential runs against Dwight Eisenhower. Jackie took charge, and Adlai became one of her most devoted followers, inviting her to lunch at the United Nations, exchanging witty letters and drawings with her.
“Jack developed enormous respect for his wife’s political judgment,” says Florida’s former senator George Smathers. “His pride in her achievements grew stronger the longer he remained in office.” Smathers maintains that even on her nonofficial trips to Italy and Greece, as well as her overtly goodwill tours of India and SouthAmerica, her letters were full of shrewd political observations that the President found useful. By their third year in the White House, Jackie was reportedly playing a role in public policy. She consistently took a more liberal (versus hard-line) view of steps toward easing tensions with the Soviet Union, such as the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the controversial sales of American grain to bail out the collapsing Soviet collective farm program. Oleg Cassini may have put it a little too strongly, considering what we now know about Mary Pinchot Meyer and other women whom Jack continued to see, but there is probably some truth in his contention that “JFK… fell in love with his wife a second time when they reached the White House and she was able to demonstrate her gifts and abilities.”
What I get from all this is a profile of a courageous First Lady fighting for a place in her husband’s presidential life, as a wife, a woman, a person in her own right. This hidden drama of Jackie’s life as First Lady reached a sort of climax when she gave birth prematurely to Patrick Bouvier Kennedy in August 1963, while she was vacationing in Massachusetts. The little boy lived only three days, and this harsh reminder that no one is master of the universe seems to have chastened and sobered the President to a remarkable degree. Jackie reached out to him for solace. Suddenly they were united, not by the conventions of marriage and power and fame but by humbling sorrow.
A number of the Kennedys’ close friends, such as Bill Walton, noticed that in the weeks after Patrick’s death, Jack and Jackie were perceptibly closer. They embraced in public—something they had never done—they went sailing together, and JFK was more deferential, more considerate. He no longer barged through doors, leaving Jackie trailing ten feet behind him, as he did repeatedly in the early White House years.
In September, on their tenth wedding anniversary, JFK gave Jackie a catalog from one of New York’s most expensive jewelers and told her to select anything she wanted. She chose a simple bracelet. Jackie gave him a gold St. Christopher’s medal to replace the silver one he had put in little Patrick’s coffin. A wedding present from her, it had been attached to a money clip.
In the light of these gestures of affection, Jackie’s decision to vacation with Aristotle Onassis a few weeks later may have been a last testing of her husband’s readiness to trust her to go her own way but to return to him, genuinely committed now, an equal partner in the pursuit of a second term. That would seem to be a reasonable interpretation of her response to Jack’s wary request for her to join him on a trip to the politically troubled state of Texas in November: “Sure I will. I’ll campaign with you wherever you want.”
We all know what happened in Texas on November 22, 1963. No one will ever forget those gunshots in Dallas, a frantic
“Jack developed enormous respect for his wife’s political judgment,” says Florida’s former senator George Smathers. “His pride in her achievements grew stronger the longer he remained in office.” Smathers maintains that even on her nonofficial trips to Italy and Greece, as well as her overtly goodwill tours of India and SouthAmerica, her letters were full of shrewd political observations that the President found useful. By their third year in the White House, Jackie was reportedly playing a role in public policy. She consistently took a more liberal (versus hard-line) view of steps toward easing tensions with the Soviet Union, such as the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the controversial sales of American grain to bail out the collapsing Soviet collective farm program. Oleg Cassini may have put it a little too strongly, considering what we now know about Mary Pinchot Meyer and other women whom Jack continued to see, but there is probably some truth in his contention that “JFK… fell in love with his wife a second time when they reached the White House and she was able to demonstrate her gifts and abilities.”
What I get from all this is a profile of a courageous First Lady fighting for a place in her husband’s presidential life, as a wife, a woman, a person in her own right. This hidden drama of Jackie’s life as First Lady reached a sort of climax when she gave birth prematurely to Patrick Bouvier Kennedy in August 1963, while she was vacationing in Massachusetts. The little boy lived only three days, and this harsh reminder that no one is master of the universe seems to have chastened and sobered the President to a remarkable degree. Jackie reached out to him for solace. Suddenly they were united, not by the conventions of marriage and power and fame but by humbling sorrow.
A number of the Kennedys’ close friends, such as Bill Walton, noticed that in the weeks after Patrick’s death, Jack and Jackie were perceptibly closer. They embraced in public—something they had never done—they went sailing together, and JFK was more deferential, more considerate. He no longer barged through doors, leaving Jackie trailing ten feet behind him, as he did repeatedly in the early White House years.
In September, on their tenth wedding anniversary, JFK gave Jackie a catalog from one of New York’s most expensive jewelers and told her to select anything she wanted. She chose a simple bracelet. Jackie gave him a gold St. Christopher’s medal to replace the silver one he had put in little Patrick’s coffin. A wedding present from her, it had been attached to a money clip.
In the light of these gestures of affection, Jackie’s decision to vacation with Aristotle Onassis a few weeks later may have been a last testing of her husband’s readiness to trust her to go her own way but to return to him, genuinely committed now, an equal partner in the pursuit of a second term. That would seem to be a reasonable interpretation of her response to Jack’s wary request for her to join him on a trip to the politically troubled state of Texas in November: “Sure I will. I’ll campaign with you wherever you want.”
We all know what happened in Texas on November 22, 1963. No one will ever forget those gunshots in Dallas, a frantic
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